Greenbuild 2023
This past week, Greenbuild Expo was held in Washington DC. Greenbuild is considered to be the world’s largest conference and expo on green building and is organized by GBCI, who administers the LEED certification. Materials, techniques and technologies, software, equipment and legislation are covered, and as a result I had the opportunity to meet with people from diverse professional backgrounds.
The conference spanned two days, and I had the opportunity to attend the plenary talks on both days and walk the expo. The new version of LEED was announced on the first day by Peter Templeton, GBCI’s CEO. The most significant change is that it now applies to existing buildings as well. This is a great step for GBCI to take, which acknowledges that decarbonizing existing buildings is an essential part of a climate solution.
I enjoyed Ezra Klein’s interview of Kal Penn who, following his Youth Engagement role at the White House under Obama, hosted the Getting Warmer docuseries on Bloomberg which illustrates solutions to climate change. Penn remarked on the widespread tactic of greenwashing by many companies, which eventually resulted in the EU enforcing stricter ruling to prevent companies from doing so.
One of the most inspiring points Penn made is that the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) was only made possible because 15 or so years of youth activism preceded the legislation. He emphasized that the work we all do now in terms of activism and policy will yield results a long time from now.
The current administration has been taking a lot of steps toward climate solutions and it was inspiring to see two of them presented by Ali Zaidi, the White House's Climate Advisor. The first was a newly-founded American Climate Corps which was only announced days before, and the other was Justice40. The Corps aims to reduce the barrier to enter green energy careers for 20,000 young people through training. Justice40 ensures that 40% of certain Federal benefits will flow directly to the communities that are suffering the most, and that the government wrote a report and created a map showing where those are.
One of the technologies that impressed me, and something that would break the barrier of implementing widespread solar on single family homes is Timberline Solar by GAF, a solar panel technology which completely integrates with regular old asphalt roof shingles and requires no special skills for installation. Other impressive products that I saw, which I’m looking forward to seeing in the market, were MettleWood and ProZero block. MettleWood is a wood that through a proprietary process gets densified without the addition of chemicals and as a result offers much greater strength, comparable to steel. Prometheus' ProZero block that is a masonry block that uses algae instead of cement, and achieves the same strength and results! Plantd uses grass to create what they call carbon negative boards and Hempitecture uses hemp to create insulation materials. All of this innovation is tremendously encouraging and it means that architects and designers will have more and better options when considering how to specify materials for maximum performance and minimum environmental impact.
As we are seeing a lot more attention paid, appropriately, to the environmental properties and embodied carbon of materials, more digital products are coming online which can help designers make better material selections for their buildings by calculating embodied carbon and reviewing their environmental properties such as Sustainable Minds and One-Click LCA. Finally, the Urban Machine seems to have solved the problem of reclaiming wood, whose main problem has long been existing nails and staples which jam planing machines and render the material useless. This company created a robot that identifies foreign objects in the wood and easily takes them out, thus making the material usable again. Pretty amazing, huh?
Overall, the Expo was an inspiring experience. It fills me with energy and optimism to see so many talented professionals working on solutions that can help solve the climate crisis. This optimistic spirit helped buoy me through the shock that I felt when I saw the front page of the only newspaper on offer at my hotel (image below). The Epoch Times is a laughably unreliable paper pushing a far-right-wing agenda, whose reach is insidious.
It is a reminder that the fight to save our planet is ongoing and the political dimension is as important as the work we do in the realm of innovation and implementation of technologies.
