New Light Bulb Labeling Will Eschew Watts for Lumens
June 24, 2010 by Matt Baker · 1 Comment
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently announced that, starting next year, light bulbs will feature new labeling on packaging designed to help consumers choose among the different types of bulbs on the market and allow them to save money by selecting the most efficient bulbs that best fit their lighting needs.
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Wilmette Public Works Facility Becomes One of Few to Hit Gold
June 17, 2010 by Matt Baker · Leave a Comment
Many municipalities across the nation have legislated the greening of their facilities. Only a handful of public works buildings, however, aim as high as LEED Gold. Wilmette’s new public works facility did just that.
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2010 Building Green Chicago Conference & Expo
June 10, 2010 by Matt Baker · 1 Comment
For the fourth straight year, Index Publishing hosted the Building Green Chicago Conference and Expo at the Chicago Marriott Downtown on April 7. The educational component was broken into four sections covering the urban landscape, water management, local energy efficiency success stories and an overview of the new LEED for Neighborhood Development.
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Architects Behaving Well and Tracking It: Meeting the AIA 2030 Commitment Starts in Chicago
June 10, 2010 by Matt Baker · 2 Comments
At this point, a lot of architects can recite chapter and verse on the negative impact buildings’ greenhouse gas emissions have on the environment. Plain and simple: buildings are the single largest contributor to the annual production of greenhouse gases.
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Innovation Incubation: A Look Inside the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center
June 10, 2010 by Matt Baker · 1 Comment
Carl Sandburg wasn’t abusing his poetic license when he referred to Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, / Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.” Situated at the midway point between production to the west and consumption to the east, the City of Big Shoulders functioned as middleman to the nation. This gave rise to miles of new rail, acres of factories and the highest concentration of butcheries anywhere. The slaughterhouses were so extensive that the stew of methane and other gases belching to the surface of the Chicago River’s South Branch from discarded, decomposing offal provided the waterway a new nickname, “Bubbly Creek.”
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Web Portal Helps Affordable Housing Become Greener
June 10, 2010 by Matt Baker · Leave a Comment
For small community organizations without much experience in sustainable building, navigating the sea of funding options to find the best fit for an affordable housing project can be as challenging as the grant applications themselves. To help close the information gap in this field, nonprofit housing lender Chicago Community Loan Fund (CCLF) has launched the latest resource for community developers: a new web resource at www.greenaffordable.org called Building For Sustainability: Resources for Sustainable Building in Chicagoland.
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Building a Better Neighborhood: LEED-ND and the Future Community
June 10, 2010 by Matt Baker · Leave a Comment
Park Forest, one of Chicago’s southern suburbs, had a curious beginning. Established in 1949, the village wasn’t served by a commuter rail line, the kernel around which most other suburbs accrued. It was in fact the first post-war, planned community built around an automobile-oriented shopping mall. Ten years later, around 29,000 residents lived in ranch style homes on large lots, enjoying the independence that their cars gave them. This new vision of suburbia would change the development landscape in America for generations
to come.
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Seeds of Change: Vertical Farming Comes to the South Side
June 10, 2010 by Matt Baker · 2 Comments
When the global population first entered the billions, Napoleon was reshaping Europe, Beethoven and Haydn were contemporary musicians and the cutting edge in technology was the steamship. That population would double sometime between the World Wars and by the turn of the millennium, humanity numbered over six billion. Of course, we’re not done; estimates suggest that by the year 2050, a world census could come in somewhere between nine and ten billion.
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ComEd Increases Financial Aid to High Performance Buildings
June 2, 2010 by Matt Baker · 1 Comment
Commonwealth Edison has announced that it will increase the maximum funding amount of financial incentives for new construction or major renovation projects in its service territory to $150,000—a $50,000 increase since the program’s inception in June of 2009.
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