I seem to be on the chemical redlist circuit this month. Last night at GreenBuild I attended Perkins + Will's panel-and-schmooze event to discuss their brand new precautionary list of 25 chemicals that P+W wants to see out of building products. They've created a publicly available website with their avoid list and you can view the list by MasterFormat divisions, or by health effect, not just by chemical.

In the 1980s, when my wife and I were expecting our first child, we decided it was time to give up our weekly adventure at the laundromat and buy our first clothes washer: a used Maytag. It was rugged and generally dependable despite its age, but it had a big drawback: it used about 50 gallons of water to wash a load of laundry. Our house was served by a spring that often ran dry in the late summer, so we had to watch our water use very carefully.

Vermont made history last week, becoming the first state to offer "feed-in tariffs" for electricity generated from renewable energy sources.

Last week I wrote about a high-tech solution for water heating--heat-pump water heaters that can cut costs by more than half compared to conventional electric water heating. This week, I'll address the low-tech efficiency side of water heating.

When you can and when you cannot count one material as contributing to more than one credit in the Materials and Resources category of LEED has confused me for years. Even the LEED Reference Guide doesn't lay it out clearly. So, after sorting it out for LEEDuser, I thought laying it out in a table might help.

An article in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Mammalogy examines the number of vehicles, by make and model, that black bears broke into from 2001 to 2007 in California's Yosemite National Park.