Internship
Feature by Roy Hinshaw
A classmate stopped me in the hall at school the other day and asked, “where have you been, I haven’t seen you this whole quarter?�
In addition to a full load of credit hours at Atlanta’s design hothouse, Portfolio Center, I am interning with ecoScorecard, LLC and learning about sustainability strategy. I jumped at the chance to join the team on the trip to Boston for the GreenBuild conference (especially since they paid my expenses).
GreenBuild is an annual event sponsored by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), a non-profit 503(c)(3) that was created 15 years ago to address ecological concerns in the building sector. The USGBC has been both a watchdog and a steward for the construction industry, which accounts for 15% of the United States GDP annually.
Since its inception in 1998, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system has promoted design and construction practices that increase a building’s efficiency, reduce negative environmental impact, and improve occupant health. Many manufacturers within the built environment have improved their practices to comply with LEED. The carpet industry, led by Ray Anderson and Interface, has acknowledged its role in producing harmful products in the last half century. New approaches to recycling and reclaiming material all along the value chain, using low-VOC chemical adhesives, and devising end-of-life strategies for carpet have resulted in innovative products designed to meet the increasing demand for greener building materials.
The exhibit hall at GreenBuild was jammed with hundreds of household names including GE, Kohler, Sherman Williams and HomeDepot to name a few. These companies were all on hand to demonstrate their latest green products. For the second year in a row, ecoScorecard (www.ecoscorecard.com) was present to promote their software to attendees. The demonstration usually began with the question, “So, what is ecoScorecard?� which was my cue to recite the following matchbook description:
“EcoScorecard is a web-based tool that helps architects and designers select green building products according to their environmental attributes and document how those products contribute to environmental ratings systems.�
This mantra is still running through my head, so if you see me at school, please don’t ask, “So, what is ecoScorecard?� – I might throw a shoe at you.
The featured speaker of the opening plenary was Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a legend and inspiration to millions. Bishop Tutu is revered for his humanitarian work around the world, especially in South Africa before the fall of the Apartheid government. His message to the attendees was simple: preserving our natural resources is a moral imperative. In his view, failing to care for the environment is tantamount to not caring about violations of human rights. Social equity issues were raised at many of the panel discussions, and a common theme discussed was the “triple bottom line,� which stands for People, Planet and Profit. Companies of all sizes are seeking to manage the way their enterprises impact the world. Success in business is no longer limited in scope to pure monetary profit. There are other considerations that are beginning to take hold, and these challenges require different modes of thought in order to accomplish a larger measure of success.
Here are some tidbits of information I picked up during the week regarding the building industry:
- 15% of the US Gross Domestic Product is generated by the building sector
- 10% of green house gas (GHG’s) emissions worldwide come from the production of Portland cement, the chemical “glue� that binds concrete together
- People spend 90% of their time indoors (e.g. inside buildings of some sort)
- Low income households spend 20 - 50% of their income on utility bills
The conference concluded with presentations from two luminaries, E. O. Wilson, a decorated biologist and thought leader and Janine Benyus, a founder and leader in the field of bio-mimic design. Dr. Wilson spent half of his life in the study of ants, resulting in a number of theories that have spawned whole fields of study. His recent launch of the online Encyclopedia of Life (www.EOL.org), is a wikipedia approach to cataloging every living organism on planet Earth. Benyus’s simple approach to creating design solutions begins with the question, “how would nature solve this?� She unveiled the Biomimicry Guild’s new interactive web concept, asknature.org, at GreenBuild.
To recount what was said by these two giants of thought would be a disservice to them and my readers, instead, I recommend that you watch the presentations and the roundtable discussion afterward at this link: http://www.greenbuild365.org/GreenExpoVideoDetail.aspx?GreenExpoID=35 Of particular note is Dr. Wilson’s short list of “good� vs. “bad� things going on in the field of biology and design.
I have heard it said that when it comes to the sustainability movement that incremental change is death. Small changes on a broad level will not be enough to ameliorate the harmful effects of human activity on our biosphere. It is encouraging to see the many sectors of an industry with such reach as construction address its impact on the environment, upon which it, and all of us are dependent.
