Sustainable Design Committee Project Ideas

Sustainable Design Committee Members,

We are in the process right now of developing a work plan for next year and would like to solicit any ideas that you have for projects.  For next year we would like to start including a few projects in our work.  Below you can find a list of ideas that we came up with at our last meeting.  Committee projects work best if the people working on them want to work on them, so we would love to hear your ideas and add them to the list.  We will be compiling the ideas and going through them at our January meeting and asking for volunteers and leaders to tackle some of this work.

1.       Concrete Taskforce follow through:  Complete and disseminate research on typical concrete mixes using supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) and other cement-reducing techniques. Expect to produce one or more articles for Equilibrium.

2.       Wood/Timber Research: There are several potential topics to be investigated/researched with regards to wood and timber construction. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

a.       Overall sustainability of wood products (examine industry claims of carbon neutral or carbon negative).

b.      How to build with wood for a longer design life.

c.       The efforts needed and benefits of using reclaimed wood products.

d.      Using CLTs or heavy timber framing as alternatives to steel/concrete structures (update for recent fire rating tests).

3.       Disaster Resilience:  Prepare 2-3 articles on disaster resilience for SEAW newsletter.  Potentially follow up with presentation.  Articles to use the 3 pillars of sustainability to justify (Economics, Environment, Social).  Preliminary basis for articles as follows:

a.       Planning for survival:  Coordinate with ACT organizations.  Focus is on what you and your family should have available in your home, office, school etc. and the appropriate behaviors and actions to follow after a disaster.  Primarily affects social pillar.

b.      Getting back to normal:  Focus is on what roles structural engineers can take to help bring society back to normal and how to plan for the activities that will be required.  Includes information on business planning to keep your business operating (economics) and on rapid evaluation procedures for buildings (social).

c.       Minimizing the impact:  Investigates how SE’s can impact the sustainability of the built environment right now, before a disaster arrives.  Showcase tools for evaluating resilience/estimating loss (ATC work and PACT software, Hazuz, etc).  Affects economic pillar immediately with delayed impact to social and environmental pillars.

4.        Foreign Building Projects:  Build a case study of innovative, green structural solutions developed for construction of volunteer projects abroad with the goals of encouraging creativity, reducing environmental impacts in our own practice, and encouraging outreach to societies in need.

5.       European design practices and standards:  Research green building practices in Europe.  Where certain areas of practice are more developed than in the US. Compare European practices and standards to the US’s and summarize changes to US practice that would be reasonable given any differences.

Local ASCE Meeting Presents Envision Rating System

For those of you who work on infrastructure projects, the Seattle and Tacoma-Olympia chapters of ASCE are hosting a speaker who will talk about the Envision rating system and it's use on a recent project.

Seattle Section December Meeting - Joint Meeting with the Tacoma-Olympia Section and the Sustainability Committee:

When:	Wednesday, December 12 at 5:30 p.m.
Where:	Embassy Suites Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, 15920 W Valley Hwy, Seattle, WA 98188
Cost:	General Admission $40 Student or Unemployed $15 Late General Admission $45 Late Student or Unemployed $20
Program:	The New Envision Rating System for Infrastructure Sustainability, with a Case Study of the 18th Avenue Street Improvement Project in Olympia (Speaker: Fran Eide, P.E., City Engineer, City of Olympia)

Please make reservations by 5:30 p.m., Monday, December 10.
Register online at ascedecember2012.eventbrite.com

The American Society of Civil Engineers worked jointly with the American Council of Engineering Companies and the American Public Works Association to develop the Envision Sustainable Infrastructure Rating System, launched in January 2012. Read about Envision. Administering the rating system is the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure.

Upcoming November SEAW Sustainability Meeting

When: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 12:00 PM-1:00 PM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada).
Where: Degenkolb, 600 University Street (One Union Square), Suite 720, Seattle
Note: The GMT offset above does not reflect daylight saving time adjustments.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Hi Everybody,

I hope you had a nice break for Thanksgiving. This month's meeting is this Wednesday at Degenkolb. We will have general announcements and discussion of future topics and work projects.

There will be no meeting in December.

October Meeting Minutes

In October we had two presentations relating to life cycle assessment and measuring the environmental impacts (primarily CO2) of building structure and the alternative impacts due to seismic damage. Minutes from the committee meeting in October are here.

SEI Sustainability Committee Publishes White Paper on Carbon Footprint

The Sustainability Committee of the Structural Engineering Institute has published their white paper on the carbon footprint of various structural building products.  It is titled, Structure and Carbon: How Materials Affect the Climate. This is a great primer for structural engineers on the environmental impacts of the structures they design.  From their announcement:

The intent of this white paper is to serve as a primer on greenhouse gas emissions, the most important of which is carbon dioxide (informally referenced simply as “carbon”), for the structural engineering community and others with an interest in the carbon impacts of structural materials and systems. It explains:

1. Why structural engineers must understand greenhouse gas emissions
2. How the construction of building structural systems contributes to greenhouse gas emissions
3. How we as a profession can help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with structural systems.

The white paper is free to download from their Carbon Working Group webpage.  Kudos to Mark Webster, who spearheaded this project, and the rest of the members who helped author the paper.

Cross-Laminated Timber Gets 2-hour Wall Rating

A press release from the American Wood Council reports that the results of successful fire tests allowed for CLT panels to be added to the 2015 IBC as an exterior 2-hour rated wall assembly for Heavy Timber (Type IV) buildings.  According to the adopted code language, the exterior side of the panel must be covered with gypsum board or fire retardant treated wood sheathing or a non-combustible material.  From the AWC:

Prior to the [IBC] hearings, as part of a project to produce a U.S. design manual for cross-laminated timber (CLT), AWC conducted a successful ASTM E119 fire endurance test on a CLT wall at NGC Testing Services in Buffalo, N.Y. The wall, a 5-ply CLT specimen (approximately 7 inches thick), was covered on each side with a single layer of 5/8" Type X gypsum wallboard. The wall was loaded to the maximum attainable by the test equipment, although it remained significantly below the full design strength of the CLT. It was then exposed to a standard fire that reached over 1800 degrees Fahrenheit in the first 90 minutes of exposure.

"While only seeking a 2-hour rating as required by building code provisions, the test specimen lasted 3 hours 6 minutes. This may also open up additional possibilities in a few specialized locations where a 3-hr fire resistance rating might be required," said AWC Vice President of Engineering Brad Douglas. 

Cross-Laminated Timber is a robust framing solution that has been developed in Europe for the past decade mainly because of its lower carbon footprint than comparable framing systems of steel and concrete.  The technology has recently expanded to North America and has gained some notoriety in British Columbia.

SEAW Sustainability Committee Update

Committee Members, 
There are a few things are going on this month that I want you to be aware of:  

• Owen Kohashi wrote a nice article on behalf of the committee in this month's Equilibrium newsletter about life cycle assessment moving into the state building code. See the article here. Thanks Owen! 
• Our tour of Bertschi's Living Building Science Wing is tomorrow, November 13th at 3:30pm. KMD Architects will lead the tour. We have one or two spots open if you want to join. Please let me know. A big thanks to Jack Wiggins and Kyle Steuck for setting this up. 
• Stay tuned for an announcement about a tour of the Gates Foundation, which we plan to offer in early December. 
• We have a blog where we will try to post meeting announcements and articles of interest on a regular basis. seawsustainability.blogspot.com  This will be used in place of our Yahoo discussion group. You can subscribe on the blog to get the posts by email.  

Minutes of the last meeting and agenda for our next meeting (Nov. 28) will be coming soon.  Have a great Thanksgiving!

Upcoming Webinar on Life Cycle Analysis for Highways

 From a LinkedIn post:

Free MIT webinar: Improving the sustainability of roadways through streamlined LCA

Please join us for our next Global Leaders in Environmental Assessment and Performance Sustainability Speaker Series webinar, taking place Friday, November 2nd from 10:00-11:00am ET. As part of our continuing series on streamlined life cycle analysis (LCA), our next speaker will be Jamie Meil, Managing Director of the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute. Jamie will be discussing their Impact Estimator for Highways software, an innovative approach to calculating a highway's environmental impact that considers the materials, construction, and maintenance phases of the life cycle. The software includes a large materials database and can be used during the design phase to evaluate and compare potential designs in terms of their environmental impact.

Whether or not the sustainability of highways is in your bailiwick, this webinar will touch on a number of overarching issues within the field of life cycle analysis, such as developing a streamlined approach to LCA in conjunction with a wide range of stakeholders, addressing issues around data collection and maintenance, and incorporating a complex and uncertain use phase into the life cycle. I hope you can join us!

Leaders in Environmental Assessment and Performance Sustainability Speaker Series
Webinar title: Streamlined LCA: Eco-Impact Estimator for Highways
Speaker: Jamie Meil, Managing Director of the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute
Date: November 2, 2012
Time: 10:00 -11:00am ET
Please register beforehand at https://mitweb.webex.com/mitweb/onstage/g.php?d=646757345&t=a.

Questions? Contact Suzanne Greene at segreene@mit.edu.

 My guess is you will be able to watch the presentation later when the LEAP Speaker Series page is updated.  Thanks for the tip, Amanda.

Rammed Earth Education at Phinney Neighborhood Center

Northwest EcoBuilding Guild is hosting a presentation on rammed earth construction at their October meeting at Phinney Neighborhood Center.  From their newsletter:

Meror Krayenhoff will present Rammed Earth V3.0, Transformation to a resilient, high performance wall system

• Introduce and provide history on Rammed Earth that has been used in construction for centuries.
• Explain that most of the myths about constraints and flaws are characteristics of rammed earth V1.0 and introduce V3.0 as the state of the art rammed earth system.
• Show how there is not yet a common language when building with earth or any shared standards across the industry.
• Present that wide adoption of rammed earth is feasible today, but will depend on how modern applications are constructed in different climates.

Where: Phinney Neighborhood Center Lower Building Basement, 6532 Phinney Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103 When: October 24th, 2012, 7:00 - 9:00 PM

The presentation is open to the general public. Free for members and $10 suggested donation for non-members. This presentation is likely oriented towards residential construction.

Seattle's LEED and Built Green Portfolio Analysis

From the Seattle Department of Planning and Development blog, Building Connections:

The Office of Sustainability and Environment has recently completed an analysis of LEED and Built Green projects certified in Seattle through 2011. . . .The reports identify the most commonly implemented sustainable design strategies and calculate the anticipated savings in energy, water and waste for these projects.  For instance, energy reductions for Seattle’s Built Green projects are expected to save a total of 6,646.8 MBTU (million British Thermal Unit) per year.  

See the their blog post for their link to the reports.  Some tidbits:

• Of the 102 LEED certified buildings in Seattle, 29 are commercial interior projects, while the other 77 are new construction.
• 47 of the projects got the most common rating, LEED Gold.  Only 4 got LEED Platinum.
• 98 projects achieved the MRc2 credit, which diverts construction and demolition debris from disposal through recycling or salvage. 90% of the construction waste, or 174,000 tons, was diverted.
• 94 projects achieved the MRc4 credit for recycled content. The most common products recycled in new construction projects were metals, concrete, and gypsum. Total value of recycled content materials was $131,490,900.
• MRc5, Regional Materials, was also very commonly achieved.
• The least common Materials Resource credits pursued or achieved were MRc1, Building Reuse, MRc3, Materials Reuse, and MRc6, Rapidly Renewable Materials.  Less than 10% of projects achieved these credits.

Since some credits are clearly more easily achievable or more preferable than others, is LEED making a big change to structural engineering?  Will the proposed credits in LEED v4, open for public comment, make a bigger difference?

October Committee Meeting

This month's meeting will be Wednesday, October 24, at noon at Degenkolb Engineers, 600 University Street (One Union Square), Suite 720, Seattle

The meeting will consist of two presentations:
Adam Slivers - Life Cycle Assessment with Athena Impact Estimator
Matthew Comber - Degenkolb's EnvISA software; used to estimate and mitigate carbon dioxide impact from disasters

Hope to see you there!

Concrete Industry Group Adopts the 2030 Challenge for Products Embraces a Low Carbon Future

From the Architecture 2030 press release:

October 4, 2012 – In an effort to help concrete producers reduce their carbon footprint, the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association (NRMCA) – a non-profit representing the producers of ready mixed concrete – today announced that it has signed on to the 2030 Challenge for Products.

NRMCA's goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete by 50% by 2030, as the 2030 Challenge for Products is stated. They aim to achieve this by development and verification of Environmental Product Declarations and furthering research and education.

LEED v4 public comment period is open

USGBC is allowing a fifth round of public comment on LEED v4, which is scheduled for release next year. Public comment period is from October 2 - December 10, though only 1/4 of the credits and prerequisites are up for comment.

Here are the proposed credits for new construction: https://new.usgbc.org/credits/new-construction/v4-draft

To comment you or your organization must be a member of USGBC. Comments appear to be entered online (must be logged in), like comments to a blog would be posted. From the USGBC:

There are two ways to submit a comment for fifth public comment: our new LEED credit library or LEEDuser discussion forums.

Guidelines

• Each respondent may submit only one set of comments on any individual credit.
• Comments may not be edited once submitted.
• Representatives of USGBC member and non-member organizations are encouraged to submit comments collectively.

SEAoNC Sustainability Blog

Just in case you can't get enough posts on sustainability in structural engineering from this blog, the Sustainable Design Committee of the Structural Engineer's Association of Northern California has a blog too!  In addition to sustainability news, there are other topics to filter through.

Mercury in Fly Ash - Hazardous in Concrete?

From Structural Engineer magazine:

For years structural engineers have incorporated fly ash into their concrete mix designs to produce high quality concrete, and its use as a cement replacement is increasing as engineers seek to reduce CO2 emissions. Questions have arisen recently over the appropriateness of incorporating fly ash into concrete due to concerns about the trace amounts of mercury found in the byproduct of coal combustion. Just as structural engineers were feeling that they were part of the solution to reduce CO2 emissions a monkey wrench was thrown into the works. This article hopes to answer some of the concerns regarding using fly ash in concrete.

Foundation Wall Insulation Details

A recent article by Jim D'Aloisio in Structural Engineer magazine highlights the "ins and outs" of continuous insulation on foundation walls.  Jim is chair of SEI Sustainability Committee's Thermal Bridging Working Group.

This is of significance to structural engineers in Washington because the 2009 Washington State Energy Code dictates the prescriptive details of insulation at foundation walls:

From a chapter relating to the "Washington State Single-Family Residential Energy Code"

502.1.4.8 Slab-On-Grade: Slab-on-grade insulation shall be placed on the outside of the foundation or on the inside of the foundation wall. The insulation shall extend downward from the top of the slab for a minimum distance of 24 inches or downward to at least the bottom of the slab and then horizontally to the interior or exterior for the total distance of 24 inches. Above grade insulation shall be protected. A 2-inch by 2-inch (maximum) nailer may be placed at the finished floor elevation for attachment of interior finish materials.

From a chapter relating to the "Washington State Nonresidential Energy Code"

1311.5 Slab-On-Grade Floor: Slab-on-grade insulation installed inside the foundation wall shall extend downward from the top of the slab a minimum distance of twenty-four inches or to the top of the footing, whichever is less. Insulation installed outside the foundation shall extend downward a minimum of twenty-four inches or to the frostline, whichever is greater. Above grade insulation shall be protected.

EXCEPTION:

For monolithic slabs, the insulation shall extend downward from the top of the slab to the bottom of the footing.

What does this mean for below-grade walls that require a firm, monolithic slab to resist lateral earth pressures?  Perhaps a lot of back-and-forth in future project meetings.

Living Building Pilot Program Adopted by Council

From Seattle DPD's Building Connections blog:

Living Building Pilot Program Adopted by Council

On July 30, the City Council adopted Council Bill 117516that amends the Land Use Code to allow more flexibility in applying land use standards for projects qualifying for the Living Building and Seattle Deep Green Pilot Programs.

Third-party certification of structural materials

The SEA of Northern California's Sustainable Design Committee wrote a paper "Establishing Third-Party Certification for Sustainable Building Materials" submitted to the SEAOC 2011 Convention Proceedings. Click here.

In case you don't want to read the whole report, the committee’s paper was submitted as an article to Structural Engineering magazine and is available here at gostructural.com.

The committee is going to push for getting material certification for concrete and steel into CalGreen.

Athena's Impact Estimator software is now free

Athena Sustainable Materials Institute makes a few pieces of software that can be used to calculate a building's environmental impacts using life cycle assessment.  The newest version of their most robust software, Impact Estimator, is now free.  Other updates, such as incorporation of composite steel framing assemblies, is now included to better estimate quantities using conceptual or schematic design information. Although Impact Estimator can quantify impacts from building operation and architectural elements, it can help structural engineers quantify impacts from steel, concrete and wood structural materials.