Muddy green - who certifies sustainable materials?

Once you start looking at one lot of dodgy green data, you start seeing problems everywhere. Either that, or the market for green credentialed products is maturing, and like with a good cheese, there is an inevitable smell associated with that.

In my previous blog post, Next insulation fiasco?, I was mainly concerned with issues related to declared thermal properties of insulating products. I was reporting a view held widely in the industry, that the declared R-values of a number of products were overstated. Within the bounds of normal caution, I was also suggesting that this is not an accident, and that possibly not all is well with how such material properties are certified.

In another product area altogether, the world of architectural textiles, the issues are slightly different. Sustainability is mainly to do with how products are sourced and manufactured. The value of certification comes about from acceptance of particular products under the multi-indicator rating tools such as the Australian Green Star, where you can get significant benefit from the award of points, automatically, for the use of such certified products.

It shouldn't be a great surprise, that this appears to have created an opportunity for commercial entities to provide the certification services. What may surprise many is that the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) gave the monopoly to certify all building products within the Green Star rating tool program to a body called Good Environmental Choice Australia (GECA), whose founder and chairman at the time happened to privately own the company, Good Environmental Choice Services P/L (trading as Environmental Assurance) which was also granted by GECA the exclusive right to audit products being certified to GECA standards. This would not have been so bad, had the 'certificates' been one-off charges, as they are for thermal performance of a building assembly (however dodgy that may be). What really rankled with most in the industry was that the monopoly effectively allowed a private individual as owner of a private company, to benefit from a “tax” by way of a licence fee based on the sales turnover of every GECA certified product.

As has become apparent from the outcome of a long running court case when orders were made last November, this arrangement (already smacking of a financial rort), was aggravated by further restrictive practices misleading the market. If I understand the Court's orders correctly, it would seem that GECA was forcing furniture suppliers to use only GECA certified textiles, even though the GECA standard itself did not call for this, and with the clear conflict of interest whereby GECA was to benefit from the arrangement by way of royalties.

While the court case brought by one company (which was seriously disadvantaged by the arrangements) has gone some way to clearing up the matters at issue in the certification, the damage to the promotion of genuine green initiatives goes on. It became well known to specifiers that in regards to textiles, it has been simple to gain certification – the mills did not have to change any processes or chemicals used in production; the supplier had to pay the audit and royalty fees and suddenly they were 'green'.

For those who are genuinely committed to sustainability principles, the biggest problem in their view, has been that the GECA standards fail to drive positive change, and are resulting in business as usual. Their cynicism extends to the Green Building Council of Australia, whom they blame for lack of due diligence. It all has a cumulative effect holding back genuine market transformation, even while it rewards greenwash, or worse.

The Greenest Building in the World

I sometimes like to enter a hyperbole into the Google search terms, just to see what it comes up with.  The headline of this blog is one of my favourites.  I do it partly because I know you can't expect Google to actually make a technical judgement; that I am only really getting whatever rises like froth to the top of Google's murky PageRank algorithm, sometimes no more than a measure of chutzpah.

And so it seemed this time.  The top-ranked page turned out to be an article by Neil Takemoto, writing for the SustainableCitiesCollective web page, about the Bullitt Centre in Seattle.  The Bullitt Foundation funds a variety of conservation projects, and committed itself to the rather ambitious Living Building Challenge for its newly built headquarters.  The first small crack in the credibility of 'the greenest' claim comes with the realisation that they really only mean it to be that in the company of conventional office buildings.

I should immediately declare that I feel terribly guilty. As one does for being at all negative about anybody's sincere efforts to truly test the envelope of business as usual.  The more especially because as I delved deeper I found that the Bullitt Foundation really has made an effort to give access to rich and useful information about the various initiatives and innovative technologies that the building employs.  More of that later.  Let me get the little negatives off my chest quickly.

In this case, the problem revolves around the contested terms that describe energy self-sufficiency.  Thus, the Bullitt Centre is described as Net Zero Energy, while the very first item in the bulleted list of its attributes states that it is "expected to use less than one fourth the energy of a typical building of its size".  Whether or not this apparent semantic contradiction confuses, relies on the reader having come across the variety of terms with their different system boundaries, which are used to describe the energy neutrality of buildings.  In this case, it is entirely possible that on the one hand the author is describing the energy demand, or energy load of the building, and that both the designers and the users have done well to very significantly reduce that demand.  If so, it is plausible that the big photovoltaic array, which tops the building like a peaked baseball cap, could just about generate the electricity portion of that demand.  Other initiatives, like the geothermal heating, would help with the rest.  Hence Net Zero Energy.  But even if that is actually the case, we would be well served by a little additional information: that most likely the building is grid connected and uses the rest of the city as its storage battery, or 'energy flywheel'.  My criticism in this regard is really of Takemoto's article.

As I often complain, short online articles give you a sort of hamburger patty version of a hearty T-bone steak and veggies.  In most such news items, even on the most committed web sites, fundamental claims for the performance of a building cannot be taken at face value. 

But the good news is that you can take the trouble to follow the link to the dedicated web page of the building.  If you more or less ignore the predictable vision, the tributes to the philanthropic partners, and the on-line leasing pages, you will find a blog.  This turns out to have an exhaustive photo record of the construction, with key technologies explained through a collection of informative articles.  There is a good selection, from geothermal drilling to the use of timber framing (where conventional office buildings would have steel or concrete).  While the information is still a bit ad hoc rather than systematic, it would be churlish to complain too much.

Finally, to give credit where credit is due, Takemoto makes no claim that the building is sustainable, and the web site is reasonably circumspect in its use of the word.  In this way, they are much more responsible than the many others who have so corrupted the term, as to make it almost useless.

It's worth linking to the original article, just for the panel that sums up the "20 imperatives of the Living Building Challenge.  Read it here.

For a quick primer on Zero energy buildings, you could do worse than Wikipedia here.

"Sorry green design, it's over"

When you want to rip into something, it's really hard to come up with a title that is more damning than their own headline.

I compulsively check the website Dezeen for what is the latest in architecture and design.  The site isn't particularly good, its editorial content and editorial style formulaic, but it's quickly accessible, carries lots of images, and importantly for me it often has drawings of buildings that it publicises.  Well, today I got my just deserts.  If I ever wanted confirmation that the design community may aptly be compared with the most parasitic manifestations of fashion generally, this article by editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs couldn't do a better job.

".....sustainability turned out to be unsustainable. We just didn't have the time; we couldn't afford to be green. We thought the products looked ugly. We didn't enjoy the preachiness or the guilt."

trumpets the editor somewhere around the middle of his rant, the culmination of the litany of one liners glibly conflating sustainability with the handmade and with one-off up-cycling.  I read on, desperately waiting for the hook, thinking I'm being wound up for the real message.  But it turns out that is the real message of this article.

".....green's message did not adapt and it ran out of steam. It fell foul of the law of diminishing returns: it's easy to make the first cut in your carbon footprint, but every subsequent one gets more difficult. And because the back-to-nature, made-do-and-mend doctrine supped from a limited gene pool of visual stimulus, it became an aesthetic trap. Once you've hewn furniture from raw timber, there's not much further you can go.
Technology however is intrinsically optimistic: each new development, each new device brings the promise of a new future. Each new way of arranging atoms or bits opens the door to a new solution cloaked in a new form. And since these elements are infinitely configurable, technological development is more sustainable than sustainability, since it will never run out of ideas."

I know, the word 'sustainable' was really debased almost as soon as it was defined, along with the much more problematic metaphor of 'green'.  But don't these people get it?  Sustainability isn't about engaging the attention span of a bright young thing with a high pain threshold for tight pants but a low one for diminishing returns.

For anybody who thinks, 'sustainable' never was confined to the exaggeratedly, and exploitatively organic.  It always engaged the potential of technology to change the balance between consumption and irreversible exploitation.  Perhaps there was reason to be sceptical that you could have such a thing as healing architecture, for instance.  But yes, we did develop LED lights and low consumption computer displays, and high yield photovoltaics all at the same time, so that we can begin to think of future buildings as giving back more than they take.  All that an article like this does, is to deny that complexity which has always been the promise of design, and substitutes for it a glib superficiality.  Okay, I know it has always been like this.  But it still hurts.

If you are a masochist, read the full article here.

And for balance, to explain why the editor's stand might be perfectly understandable, glance at this article, also in the same day's Dezeen.  It is on the work of Sou Fujimoto with the image of Final Wooden House as its anchor.