
by aleida, on April 28th, 2010
Image courtesy of BrightTALK webinar
BrightTALK’s Green Building Summit continued on April 22, 2010 with What’s Good and What’s Next: The Future of Sustainable Materials, a panel discussion moderated by our very own Kevin O’Donnell. I won’t write more about the session here as Kevin will post on it later this week. Instead, I’ll [...]

by aleida, on April 26th, 2010

Image courtesy of BrightTALK webinar
To mark the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, BrightTALK, the on-line webinar service, went all out with a week-long schedule packed with a total of 54 sessions. Of the eight presented on April 22, seven focused on green building. Kevin previewed the day’s line-up here. I started the day with The Economics of Green Building, presented by George Elvin, Ph.D., the Director of Green Technology Forum and an Associate Professor of Architecture at Ball State University.
The main theme of the presentation was, as he put it, “saving the planet without breaking the bank.” (Why do people insist on this ridiculous notion of “saving the planet”??) He touched upon these six major topics:
- no- to low-cost LEED credits
- tax incentives
- high ROI investments
- fist cost vs. life cycle cost
- economic benefits
- green project financing
The forty-eight minutes that Elvin had for this session prevented him from doing an in-depth look into any of these topics, yet he managed to pack in a lot of information. I’ll take a cue from him and focus only on what he presented for item number one. For it, Elvin provided some of the results of a survey from earlier this year that asked practitioners to identify what they considered the most low-cost LEED credits that they achieved in a building.
Read more event review: BrightTALK GBS3 session 1 
black friday waste
Black Friday is once again upon us. It’s the largest single shopping day in the United States. Since we’re the largest consumer economy in the world, it’s also the world’s biggest single shopping day. Yet, while we in the US are lining up at stores awaiting their doors to open at ridiculous hours, elsewhere [...]