GREENSAW Blog: What's All This Green-Tech Hype?

Monday, May 17, 2010

What's All This Green-Tech Hype?

“I know very few environmentalists whose heads aren’t firmly up their ass.” So says Saul Griffith, the subject of the New Yorker article “The Inventor’s Dilemma” (17 May 2010).

Griffith, perhaps one of the foremost green-minded inventors to have sprung from the prodigious loins of M.I.T., has forsaken inventing new technology. Instead, he tinkers with what already exists. This is a concerted step away from what he labels the “green-tech hype,” and a step toward making do with what we have.

I won’t spend any more time dealing with his epiphanic moment – the New Yorker does that well enough. But I would like to touch on a few key points he raises, and examine how they dovetail into our own philosophy of building.

“We’ve been working on energy, as a society, for a few thousand years, and especially for the last two hundred years, so we’ve already turned over most of the stones,” Griffith says. This revolution of thought came after brainstorming floating wind turbines, solar-powered highways, spoke-mounted L.E.D. lights for bicycles, and a machine to made eyeglass lenses cheaply. His basic point is that we ignore, at our peril, the consummation of natural resources and the greenhouse gases created in the process of building.

Instead, Griffith has made a study of Portugal, where houses have thick walls and small windows. I would imagine he would interest himself in a French farmhouse, called a mas, a one-story masonry building oriented to the south, built into a hillside to catch the low-lying winter sun, while avoiding the high sun come the vicious Provençal summer.

As a model for his new thought he looks to the power supply for a telephone from the 1920s. Almost a century old, it still works as it first did, generating enough electricity to throw someone across the room. Ostensibly, it will continue to work for the next five hundred years.

Cell phones, on the other hand, become useless after a finite number of charging cycles. Automobiles, kitchen appliances, computers – they are not built to last. We must figure out exactly what we have at our fingertips, and reclaim it for a current use.

Griffith speaks of his ability to build a “thermodynamically amazing…zero energy” structure. But, he points out, the energy it takes to build this structure would derive from fossil fuels. Even his idea of solar-powered highways, he believes, would not be a “green” move, due to the amount of fossil fuels needed for its construction.

It is from this platform that he addresses the work of Al Gore, who he dubbed the “No. 1 environmental hypocrite.” Gore flies constantly, justifying his carbon footprint by pointing to his effort to spread the word on global warming. Griffith responds, “I don’t think we can buy the argument anymore that you get special dispensation just because what you’re doing is worthwhile.”

It’s a difficult and complicated argument. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s as simple as Griffith calculates. On his website, www.wattzon.com, one can create a pie chart that shows the energy consumed in all aspects of life – driving, flying, and eating. The program calculates this number down to the watt. Griffith’s goal is to live at 2,500 watts. He’s currently at about 8,000.

Griffith’s realization boils down is this: we cannot invent our way out of this problem. Sure, it’s sexier to think we can “discover” a new avenue that will suddenly cut a swath through issues of heating and cooling, the desire to travel, to eat what we want when we want. We are a country built on Benjamin Franklin’s belief that “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Send the kite up to the skies in a thunderstorm, and see what happens….

As a company, we are currently finishing a job at the house of Judy Wicks, founder of the White Dog Café, and the Sustainable Business Network. Wicks has been trailblazer here in Philadelphia, and the world, for local, sustainable practice. We follow in the large footprints she has left.

To build her kitchen, we used the rafters that were deconstructed from her third floor. The cherry countertop comes from a tree in Lancaster that was downed in a lightning storm. The armoire we built for her bedroom is reclaimed from an estate, the material on her deck comes from a New York City water tower, the cedar in the lockers in her yard from a barn in Lancaster.
We are completing a job for the Whitesell’s on Fifth and Spruce in Society Hill. Oak flooring was removed, exposing the original yellow pine beneath. We will use the oak flooring – almost an inch thick – to construct their third floor bathroom.

A LEED Platinum job in Northern Liberties is also getting under way. We will use reclaimed material for the flooring, kitchens, bathrooms, trim, and framing – we get our framing material from struck movie sets.

In my mind, this is what Griffith is talking about: instead of thinking that someone will create a skeleton key to unlock the answer to all our problems, just be a little bit smarter about the materials you work with. Find innovative ways to re-use what already exists, or take a look back to the old-timers to get a sense of how they wrapped their heads around problems of energy.

The answer here lies not only in reclaiming and recycling building material. It also concerns the buildings strategies employed to get you to a finished structure. I’m thinking here of Passive House technology.

Tim McDonald, President and CEO of Onion Flats (www.onionflats.com), is a huge proponent of Passive House, a concept that promotes carbon-neutrality by using passive solar gain and an aggressively sealed and thought-through house. This is directly in line with what we are doing at Greensaw: don’t depend on technology, but rather look to the cards we’re dealt already. The wind blows here, the sun shines here, and it rains every so often. How do we make this work without hugely complicated machinery?

The United States Green Building Council, inventors of LEED, is not especially helpful on this. We can score points in LEED for Homes if we use reclaimed tropical wood, but not local reclaimed wood. Why is this? All our framing material comes from Resource Exchange (www.resourceexchange.org) here in Philadelphia. Resource Exchange is non-profit, re-use company who salvages movie set materials that typically ends up in a dumpster. It is possible that we will score an “innovation” point for this in the LEED charette, but it won’t be a whole lot more.

In addition, you only get one lonely point for building using an existing structure. This strikes me as absurd. The amount of fossil fuel not to mention landfill space that it takes to demo a building and build new should hugely influence the final LEED score.

Now it is one thing for a literature major like me to spout on about reclaimed material, the great stories behind architectural salvage, how much more beautiful it is than new wood and so forth and so on. But when a lifelong inventor and recipient of the 500k MacArthur “genius grant” starts saying that this invention thing ain’t going so hot, maybe we should start figuring out better ways to reclaim and recycle what we already have – well, I, for one, am all ears.

Labels: Architectural salvage, green builders, Green building, Greensaw, reclaim, recycle

posted by Brendan Jones @ 10:38 AM

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A blog addressing the importance of re-using material, and building with existing structures. A strong emphasis on architectural salvage, as well as the people that make the difficult work possible.

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Name: Brendan Jones
Home: Philadelphia, PA, United States
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