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Ross Spiegel Q&A: Green Building Materials
Felicia Oliver, Senior Editor, HousingZone
April 29, 2005
HousingZone
Ross Spiegel is senior specification writer with the Connecticut-based architectural/engineering firm Fletcher-Thompson Inc. He is responsible for creating written construction documents and establishing technical standards and processes for the firm. Spiegel is co-author with Dru Meadows of the book "Green Building Materials: A Guide to Product Selection and Specification." Spiegel has been a member of the Construction Specifications Institute since 1978. In 1994, Spiegel was appointed CSI's liaison to the U.S. Green Building Council, and continues in that position today. Spiegel has served on the USGBC's Board of Directors for four years, and on the LEED Steering Committee for one.
HousingZone.com Editor Felicia Oliver spoke with Spiegel about the complexities of selecting green building products.
HousingZone: There are so many variations and degrees of green building products. What would be the most basic definition, or minimum qualification a product must meet to be considered green?
Spiegel: That is a very good basic question. It's one that becomes much more difficult because of the fact you can judge a product by one single attribute. It might be recycled content; it might be recyclable; it might have a very low volatile organic (VOC) content; or it might be wood from a certified forest. The difficulty is that if you only look at that one attribute, there might be some other areas of the very same product that are negative. You need to look at the total impact of the product on the environment.
There are numerous certification programs out there. The Forest Stewardship Council does the certification program for wood products. There is the Green Guard Institute in Atlanta, which tests and certifies interior products including furniture, furnishings and interior materials like insulation before they will certify that they are environmentally friendly. There is also Green Seal, which also does testing of products. So as an architect or a contractor, you can look to certifications that are available as a way of [avoiding] doing all of this [research] on your own.
I'm sure you're familiar with Environmental Building News and their efforts. That really has always been my touchstone, mainly because they don't accept advertising. When they do a generic product review, they're beholden to no one. One of their publications is called the GreenSpec® Directory, which is actually a listing of products by CSI [Construction Specifications Institute] MasterFormat™ section numbers. They also have that information available for a fee on their Web site. They just came out with a similar publication, which is specifically geared to the residential market.
HousingZone: Sometimes products that are green can be combined with each other and produce a result that has some degree of toxicity, or there may be other outcomes that are undesirable. How does a builder go about finding out that information?
SPIEGEL: It really is a challenge, and I think they will need to have conversations with the manufacturers of the products as much as we do in order to understand better what the attributes are. If you work in sustainable design, and if you do any LEED projects, you're going to try and approach it holistically, meaning you take the totality of the project into consideration, and the same thing holds true for building materials and building systems.
From what I've seen from contractors and builders at this point, they're still experiencing the learning curve design professionals have gone through the last couple of years in understanding better what sustainable design is. It's a whale of a job.
When I do presentations on and specifying for green buildings, what I always [say] to the design professionals in the audience is that one of their roles during the process of bidding and constructing a project is to act as an educator, to share the information and experience they've obtained with the construction end, and to work directly with product manufacturers to encourage them to get out there and spend more time with contractors and educate them as well.
The National Association of Homebuilders is making green construction part of their focus. They are probably going to come out with some larger documents of guidance specifically geared for contractors. So there are some things out there specifically developed to meet the need of [getting] contractors educated on the subject. But I don't think that they can independently go out there and start the whole research effort over again on their own.
HousingZone: LEED accredits green building projects, but they aren't in the business of accrediting products specifically.
SPIEGEL: No, they aren't, and that's one of the misconceptions that people run into. They say, "I'm going to get my product certified." LEED does not specifically certify products. Yes, products that you use in a project can lend themselves to improving the chances of [that project] being certified. And that's true regardless of what particular ratings system you want to use.
There is a system that's coming from Canada called GreenGlobes. I have not researched it myself completely. They are trying to establish themselves as a competitor to LEED. How successful they'll be, we don't know yet. But it certainly is interesting. It means that not only is LEED highly successful, but it has spurred other people to want to compete.
HousingZone: There are different agencies that are either certifying projects as sustainable or manufacturing products that are sustainable. Are they all using similar methodologies? How can you judge whether or not GreenGlobes is going to be a better method than LEED or the next organization that comes out with a set of standards?
SPIEGEL: You have to look at what the basis is for the certification system. Are they basing it on independent acknowledgment or are they basing it on very clear and specific standards? My experience with LEED is that it certainly has quirks, as much as anything else does, which they're working on fixing. But it is based upon established standards. It requires that you adhere to those standards.
We started a project here in our office about three years ago for the state of Connecticut, for one of the state universities. It was not intended to be a LEED project when it was started. But as we were finishing the construction documents, the state came to us and said, "Look, we think we'd like to try to [make] this project the first LEED registered and certified project in Connecticut that the Department of Public Works builds. What would that take?" So we looked at the effort required plus additional cost of construction, etc. and made that proposal. They went ahead and accepted it.We had to revise the documents using the LEED checklist to see how many points we can [could] get before we changed anything. There is very little in the LEED green building rating system, or any [rating system], which is outside of the norm that you would find on a project. A lot of the [things we needed to do to earn] points and credits were [already] required to deal with the engineering system, air conditioning, plumbing, heating and electrical. It's all good standard engineering practice. Other rating systems certainly need to be based upon the same type of standards that are known, established, and already in use or at least familiar to the architectural/engineering community.
HousingZone: Do you have a personal opinion about PVCs [polyvinyl chlorides] and whether LEED credits should be given for not using them?
SPIEGEL: You're familiar with the [US] Green Building Council study. It released its draft paper in December. I have read parts of their report. I've read what the Healthy Building Network had to say. I've also looked at what's been done in Europe and what other countries have done outside of the United States in banning PVC from construction. If the case that [these experts are] making is true and sustained by research, then I think what's going to happen eventually in this country is what has happened in parts of Europe and elsewhere around the globe, where PVC has been excluded from being acceptable for use in building projects.
I'm not a scientist, and a lot of what was written in the draft report that was released by USGBC was certainly much too scientific for me, so I'm still on the fence about it. I'm going to continue to monitor it and watch and see what else comes out about it. They're saying it's not just the material itself that is causing the problem; it's the manufacturing process used to make PVC. You also have to look at the shear number of products that go into a building with PVC as a component. [But] they're certainly are numerous products that can be used in lieu of PVC at this point, which have been accepted by code authorities throughout the country. So we'll have to see what happens.
HousingZone: What products have the most green options? For instance, if someone is looking for carpeting, are there enough environmentally friendly types of carpeting for a builder to choose from?
SPIEGEL: Well, interestingly enough, carpet probably has the most [green selections] of all the finished material products that go into a building. And if you look at acoustical ceiling tile, all manufacturers today use recycled content in their ceiling tile and in their grid. Some of them have recycling programs where they will actually take back anybody's tile, not just their own, and recycle it.
Gypsum wallboard – dry wall – you can find that very easily nowadays with recycled content gypsum. And the facer sheets on both sides of the Gypsum wallboard are from recycled newsprint or recycled paper. So you have a product that, again, that has some very good attributes and is readily available.
There are several manufacturers that make resilient flooring, not necessarily vinyl but rubber. You have some that have recycled content, and some that are made from linoleum product, which has all natural components. Armstrong had a linoleum product for many years. They ceased making it, and now they've started it up again. I think they're looking at Forbo, which is based in Europe and has been around for a very long time, as being the primary supplier of linoleum. And there are other manufacturers. Linoleum has often been cited as an alternate product to using vinyl flooring and vinyl sheet goods as well.
Of course, there's paint. Every manufacturer now has a VOC – volatile organic content – compliant paint to meet the requirements of the LEED Program, and also the State of California. There's a specific agency in California that has set forth standards that govern the VOC acceptable in paint products. Usually you'll see this right in the LEED Rating System. Years ago paint manufacturers did not have these products and made the shift over a period of time, mainly under government pressure to do so. Today most of them have the technology to make the same high quality product with less VOC than they ever did before.
About ten years ago when I first started hearing about it, I actually bought some in Home Depot. The paint product certainly had no odor, but really did not have durability and was not easy to apply. Five years after that I'm repainting the same room and found that the next generation or two of paint products still had no odor, but now the coverage and appearance is good as well.
The good part of all of this is that it helps drive down the prices of these products, because they're no longer specialty products and they're readily available.
HousingZone: What about remodelers who are trying to incorporate green products into an existing project? Are there special considerations or resources needed to do so effectively?
SPIEGEL: I think so, because those projects are even more difficult than new construction projects, even if you're not doing a green renovation project. Being able to understand what was in [the building] originally is a challenge, especially because the documentation often doesn't exist anymore. Contractors are well positioned to work in that area because it requires some nondestructive testing, some nondestructive investigation, and even some destructive investigation. We usually will do this when our office is hired to do an addition or an expansion on an existing building.
The very first thing we do after we start working on the project is to send a team out to document the existing building. In some cases the client wants us to match some of the existing materials, and believe me it is not easy. It's a matter of bringing specialists in who, in essence, are product representatives who can take a look at that brick wall and say, "Yep, I know who that [manufacturer] is, and I can tell you the color." It's the same thing with any of the other systems in the building. If you find people who have the experience, and they can certainly be from the construction side, they can be extremely helpful in giving you a good starting point to work on that.
We were looking at a project where the client wanted to add here and there to the building. They said "Do you think we can do this as a LEED project?" I looked at it and said "Unfortunately you're not doing enough in one building to make this worth it for the council to say, 'Yeah, we could certify that.'" So I recommended that they follow certain sustainable guidelines [regarding] the materials that go into it, so they can say that they've created a sustainable and healthy environment. They're looking at that now to see if that's what they want to do.
I've gotten to the point where I'm recommending that more as a way doing things as opposed to everyone doing a LEED-certified project. Not every project in my mind is appropriate. I'd like to do more of them, but I'm certainly not going to make something that's so incredibly difficult [or expensive] that it's never going to happen.
© 2009, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
