This spring, the National Building Museum is debuting the first-ever museum exhibition dedicated to the greening of American schools. Featuring over 40 exemplary projects from new construction to rehabs to modular classrooms, the exhibition surveys the extraordinary breadth of green school design in the United States through sample building materials, photographs, video, and green products.
Authored by: Dr. Sara Gottfried, MD
In my practice, thousands of patients have come to me with the same complaint:
“I exercise. I eat lots of fruits and vegetables. I drink water all day. Why do I feel so terrible?”
Everywhere I go, I see schools falling apart. On my way to work in D.C., I pass schools with broken windows and crumbling bricks. In the Bronx, I’ve been inside schools where only one out of four bathroom stalls is even remotely usable. In Georgia, I’ve met students and teachers forced to take time away from the classroom to treat headaches and asthma attacks. In my capacity as the director of the Center for Green Schools, I’ve visited schools in more than 27 states. I know that our schools are in desperate need of repair.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 12, 2013) –The Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) today released its first “State of our Schools” report, highlighting the critical need to modernize school facilities to meet current health, safety and educational standards.
The report, featuring a foreword by former President Bill Clinton, states that schools are currently facing a $271 billion deferred maintenance bill just to bring the buildings up to working order – approximately $5,450 per student.
But a new study finds that it is technically and economically feasible to convert New York’s all-purpose energy infrastructure to one powered by wind, water and sunlight (WWS). The plan, scheduled for publication in the journal Energy Policy, shows the way to a sustainable, inexpensive and reliable energy supply that creates local jobs and saves the state billions of dollars in pollution-related costs.
Here’s our weekly collection of green building clips:
Coming soon: Sustainability ratings for real estate investments, GreenBiz. This article highlights the collaborative effort among USGBC, the FTSE Group and NAREIT to create a new family of green property indexes for institutional and retail investors, due to launch at the end of March.
Higher performing, healthier LEED-Certified buildings are becoming the market norm, increasingly demanded by owners and tenants alike. Did policy play a role in this growth? At the state and local levels, the answer is ‘yes.’
States and localities are embracing energy efficiency building policies, adopting rating systems like LEED for public building construction, and incentivizing better building practices in the private sector. The support of USGBC’s network of chapters and advocates has helped guide and prompt good policy making in a variety of ways.
Higher performing, healthier LEED-Certified buildings are becoming the market norm, increasingly demanded by owners and tenants alike. Did policy play a role in this growth? At the state and local levels, the answer is ‘yes.’
States and localities are embracing energy efficiency building policies, adopting rating systems like LEED for public building construction, and incentivizing better building practices in the private sector. The support of USGBC’s network of chapters and advocates has helped guide and prompt good policy making in a variety of ways.
Understanding, communicating and analyzing building materials is a critical frontier for the green building industry. Google has recently provided a generous grant to USGBC to, in part, advance thought leadership and applied research in this area.
As part of this project, USGBC is inviting applications for two new opportunities.
Historic preservation is a green building strategy. A new guidance manual, LEED for Neighborhood Development and Historic Preservation, outlines strategies (and reasoning) geared towards helping project teams incorporate historic resources into their developments. This new recourse connects reuse and rehabilitation of historic resources with energy, water, waste, and infrastructure efficiency.