What Events Are Going On October 2016?

By Alexander Landa, Outreach and Communications Manager


Hello from Los Angeles! We're here having a blast, enjoying the wonderful west coast weather and seeing all the cool stuff that Greenbuild 2016 has to offer. We're already getting pumped for Greenbuild 2017 in Boston, and it's great to see this year's event being so successful. While this week is devoted to Greenbuild in LA, the rest of this month has plenty going on in Boston!

Wednesday, 10/19: LEED Exam Prep Course
Get ready for your LEED exam with this day-long educational workshop.

Thursday, 10/20: UMass Boston University Hall Building Tour
Come join your green building colleagues for a tour of the University of Massachusetts Boston’s new University Hall.

Wednesday, 10/26: Healthy Materials Summit
Are your clients concerned about the materials in their buildings? Of course they should be. You can help them stay on top of the subject. Come join us at Google's Cambridge HQ for this deep dive into the health implications of building materials and finishes.

Thursday, 10/27: USGBC MA Emerging Professionals + BSA EPNet : HallOlympics
Join the Emerging Professionals of the USGBC and BSA Emerging Professionals for some Healthy competition in your best sports costume, we're having HallOlympics! 

Healthy Materials Summit 2016 Speaker Bio: Brent Ehrlich

By Alexander Landa, Outreach and Communications Manager


With the Healthy Materials Summit 2016 later this month, it's time to get to know the speakers. This professional gathering event held at Google's Kendall Square HQ in Cambridge, MA, covers all grounds for understanding healthy materials in the construction process, and why you should care about it. The ultimate goal of the Healthy Materials Summit is to bring the issues relating to building materials into light, in hopes to inspire commercial leaders, designers, and builders, and manufacturers and product vendors to increase their supply and demand of transparent, healthy building materials and products.

Brent Ehrlich of BuildingGreen is the products & materials specialist and serves as products editor, where he researches and writes about green building products, materials, and their health and environmental impacts. He also leads a team of editors who select industry-leading products for the company's BuildingGreen Approved program on Designer Pages. A LEED AP BC+D, he has been researching and writing about green building for more than a decade, but has also taught college composition, copy edited science journals, worked as a carpenter, and managed a large commercial kitchen in the Colorado Rockies.

It isn't too late to register for the Healthy Materials Summit 2016! You can find more info here.

Wednesday, October 26th, 2016
8:00 AM – 8:00 PM
Google Cambridge Headquarters
5 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA, 02142

October 2016 Newsletter – Greetings From Greenbuild 2016 In LA!

By Grey Lee


See the complete October 2016 USGBCMA newsletter here!

Greetings from Greenbuild!

We are at the biggest convention and most fun gathering of green building professionals in the world. Well, this one is great here in LA but it will actually be better in Boston in November next year.

I hope you save the date and get it into your budget to attend Greenbuild in Boston – it is an amazing opportunity to be in an incredible density of connected green building advocates.

Yesterday we heard from USGBC on the launch of “arc” a new software platform to connect building data and create a new wave of competitive energy to improve building performance. Arc will support LEED Cities – a new system to engage “beyond the building” and ensure our entire built environment improves on sustainability metrics. It was exciting!

So far, in the first 24h of Greenbuild, 6,434 hours of aggregate credential maintenance have been logged – there are a lot of great sessions going on and over 30 Massachusetts-based professionals are delivering education sessions here. Not only are we wicked green, we're also wicked smaht!

I look forward to seeing you at some of our events in the coming weeks. Definitely sign up for our Healthy Materials Summit on 10/26 at Google in Cambridge, and consider joining some of our upcoming tours and service projects.

For those heading to ABX in November, please review the links below: we want you to sign up to these courses! They are going to be great – take a look and register.

Thank you again for participating in our mission to transform the built environment into net positive effects for our society and our planet.

Thanks,

Grey

See the complete October 2016 USGBCMA newsletter here!



Healthy Materials Summit 2016 Speaker Bio: Gregory Norris

By Alexander Landa, Outreach and Communications Manager


With the Healthy Materials Summit 2016 later this month, it's time to get to know the speakers. This professional gathering event held at Google's Kendall Square HQ in Cambridge, MA, covers all grounds for understanding healthy materials in the construction process, and why you should care about it. The ultimate goal of the Healthy Materials Summit is to bring the issues relating to building materials into light, in hopes to inspire commercial leaders, designers, and builders, and manufacturers and product vendors to increase their supply and demand of transparent, healthy building materials and products.

Dr. Gregory Norris, ILFI/Harvard, is an internationally acclaimed Life Cycle Analysis expert. In addition to serving as the Institute's Chief Scientist, Gregory is the co-director of the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise within the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has taught Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) at HSPH since the late 1990s. Gregory is also the founder of New Earth, a non-profit institute developing technologies that enable people across the globe to drive sustainable development 'from the bottom up.' Its projects include Earthstar, an open source platform for product-level sustainability assessment, Handprinter, which helps people take actions at home and work that more than compensate for their environmental and social 'footprints,' and the Social Hot Spots Database, a transparent data source on supply chain impacts and opportunities for improving human rights, working conditions, community, and other social impacts.

It isn't too late to register for Healthy Materials Summit 2016! You can find more info here.

Wednesday, October 26th, 2016
8:00 AM – 8:00 PM
Google Cambridge Headquarters
5 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA, 02142

 

Our Next LEED Exam Prep Course Is Two Weeks Away!

By Alexander Landa, Outreach and Communications Manager


Two weeks from today is our next LEED exam preparation course! We know many of you are busy this time of year with holidays, events like Greenbuild, and others, but it's never a bad idea to brush up on your LEED knowledge for any upcoming test you may be planning to take.

For real estate professionals, architects, engineers, students, and anyone else who has a passion for green building practices and LEED, this course is designed for individuals of all knowledge levels, and to cover a vast majority of exam topics.

In addition to this course, there are a few other ways you can prepare. You can catch up with the LEED Green Associate Handbook, and the LEED Core Concepts Guide, for starters.

 

Wednesday, October 19th, 2016
50 Milk Street
18th Floor, Hemingway Room
Boston, MA

Register here.
Learn more about the course here.

My Personal Thanks For Green Building Showcase 2016!

By Grey Lee


Wow – it's been a week and I'm still glowing from Green Building Showcase 2016. It was our most successful fundraiser ever, thank you to the many who attended and the generous sponsors who stepped up to get in front of our community and demonstrate their leadership. 

Thank you to Boston Properties, National Grid, Eversource, View, Arup, Turner, Elkus Manfredi, and AHA Consulting Engineers for signing up to be our major sponsors. We look forward to continuing to help you connect to our professional community to achieve more green buildings!

Throughout the evening, I was constantly bumping into the leaders of our community, and the up-and-coming leaders who were great to see. We had some great speakers. If you weren't impressed by Bryan Koop, well I don't know what to do with you. He is demonstrating that hard-nosed commercial real estate development can embrace and profit from taking on these green building projects. Practitioners in design and engineering constantly hear from owners that green buildings are too expensive, that it's not justifiable to go for certification, that it's not going to fit in the schedule. It's too bad. They are missing out. Clearly, smart operating developers, a team like the one at Boston Properties, have figured it out. They are building LEED certified buildings throughout the Boston regional market and attaining premium rents and attracting awesome tenants. We commend their work. 

It was great to hear from Austin Blackmon at the City of Boston and to have him see the vibrant community of green building professionals who are ready to support the City's initiatives such as Climate Ready Boston and to continue to execute awesome projects. We are especially ready to see more LEED O+M projects – existing buildings embracing the processes of improvement and benefiting from the rigors or the LEED process. Look at what companies like AHA have done under the leadership of Bob Andrews – almost 30M s.f. of LEED certified space in existing buildings (well, this is throughout the country, but some big ones in Boston for sure). The institutional and government commitments for improved performance in the building sector – for energy efficiency, GHG reductions, improved air quality, and other goals – are going to be implemented by the people who were at the Showcase. It is an exciting crew to be around.

As I walked past the showboards on display, I overheard many conversations that were about building science, but also the great sounds of laughter, and cheerful friendly banter. So many people were catching up with colleagues who they had worked with some time ago together on a project. It was like a family reunion.

Thank you to all the special guests including our other sponsors, including Menck, HDR, The Green Engineer, Gerding Elden, Finegold Alexander, Suffolk, Watergrip Media, Ellenzweig, BR+A, Aircuity, and Erlab. 

I was proud to have been part of the team who organized and built out the Showcase to help strengthen our position as a community delivering solutions to the real estate sector and our government and institutional partners who share our mission. I was thrilled to communicate to those agents how ready we are to step up and transform the built environment for net positive outcomes for our community.

Thank you to all who were able to participate, congratulations to the award winners, and I hope to see more of our community at upcoming events with USGBC MA. Let's continue working on more green buildings!

Don't forget to come out to Healthy Materials Summit 2016, October 26th at Google's Cambridge HQ!


Join Us For Healthy Materials Summit 2016 In Cambridge October 26

By Grey Lee


Healthy materials is a topic that every green building proponent and advocate must engage on. Join us on 10/26 for a day of exploration, inspiration, and hands-on “how to” events with experts from the field of building materials science. What do you need to deepen your understanding of? What resources do you wish you had? Join us for the Healthy Materials Summit at Google in Cambridge to connect with your colleagues to share how to structure healthy materials concerns into every project you work on.

Speakers include Brent Ehrlich from Building Green, Rebecca Calahan Klein of Global Health Exchange, and Monica Nakielski of Partners Healthcare. USGBC Massachusetts Chapter Board Member Barbra Batshalom of the Sustainable Performance Institute will share how firms can systematically embrace healthy materials and the International Living Future Institute's Greg Norris will update us on the Living Product Challenge. Stay the afternoon for a full workshop on that!

We know buildings need to be net positive for our society – not just places to get things done or pretty things to marvel at.

The industry has come a long way since the first oil price shocks and energy efficiency became synonymous with a good building. Now, with net zero and passive house certifications, we have ways of really asserting the energy performance of a building.

Next is health. We are moving fast to embrace buildings as places to improve quality of life (or work) and improve physiological effects on occupants. The LEED system (v4) is incentivizing transparency in materials – considering their health effects. The Living Building Challenge has the Red List of “no-go” materials. The WELL building standard was developed to force thinking around health outcomes and materials concerns are right there.

Come out an participate with this community in a deep dive to get better with the tools, the terminology and the techniques that will be standard practice in the coming months and years.

We look forward to seeing you at the Healthy Materials Summit!

If you're interested in attending, you can find tickets here.

For those interested in sponsoring, you can find all of that information here.

U.S. Building Owners Show Strong Support for Better Designed, Healthier Buildings to Improve Employee Wellness

By Alexander Landa, Outreach and Communications Manager


According to a Sept. 15 press release from the USGBC, for building owners, developers, managers, and investors, designing and constructing healthier buildings is proving to be a clear business benefit. The results of a SmartMarket Report and Dodge Data & Analytics released the initial report.

The “Drive Toward Healthier Buildings 2016” report supports the notion that the design and construction industry in the U.S.. is more widely accepting building practices that are physically, mentally,and socially healthy for occupants. Two-thirds of building owners consider healthier buildings to be important, with most of them believing that these buildings will lead to higher employee satisfaction and engagement.

“Our world is confronting massive challenges that affect our physical, mental and social well-being,” said Mahesh Ramanujam, chief operating officer, USGBC. “We know that programs like USGBC’s LEED green building rating system and IWBI’s WELL Building Standard provide key solutions to business leaders who are looking for the best way to create healthier, more sustainable buildings. We will continue to educate and push the market to prioritize human health in the built environment, which has benefits that extend beyond the building itself to the cities, communities and neighborhoods where we live.”

The five primary healthy buildings features are better lighting/daylighting exposure, products that enhance thermal comfort, spaces that enhance social interaction, enhanced air quality and products that enhance acoustical comfort. It's likely that the use of these features in designs moving forward will increase, alongside other further innovation techniques.

Our Chapter of the USGBC supports this notion wholeheartedly, as evidenced by our upcoming Healthy Materials Summit. To be held October 26th, 2016 in Google's Cambridge office, this event will cover topics related to the use of materials in buildings. Learn about how industry leaders are leveraging health product declarations (HPDs) and environmental product declarations (EPDs) to create buildings that improve the quality of life for their occupants and build their corporate brand.

You can read the full press release here.

Massachusetts and California Share Top Energy Efficiency Ranking

By Alexander Landa, Outreach and Communications Manager


On September 28th, 2016, The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) released its 2016 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard yesterday, with the good news that Massachusetts is still ranking #1, and tied with California.

In the press release from Acadia, MA's score – its highest to date – increased in thanks to adopting the most recent IECC 2016 and ASHRAE 90.1-2013 as part of the state building code. All of these factors contribute to a lower energy cost for new homes and businesses.

“Massachusetts is on the winning path, but there is still plenty of work to do to make the most of this low-cost, clean resource,” said Amy Boyd, Senior Attorney at Acadia Center. “We should celebrate our success, but then return to the hard work that it takes to accelerate strategies to reach the homes and businesses that still need help lowering their energy costs,” Boyd said. “Making smart use of all the data that new technologies can provide utility companies will reduce costs, make processes more transparent, and keep us on track to stay on top of the ACEEE rankings,” Boyd concluded.

The state of Massachusetts is incredibly devoted to energy efficiency. The state's current three-year plan is expected to bring $8.1 billion in economic benefits, among other positive impacts.

You can read the rest of the press release here.

Getting Ahead of 2017 Energy Codes

By Alexander Landa, Outreach and Communications Manager


If you didn't get the chance to join us on Tuesday, September 27th, then you missed a great presentation on Energy Codes. In this course lead by Chris Schaffner, LEED Fellow and founder and President of The Green Engineer Inc., the morning was engaging and informative, enlightening those who attended to become more aware about MA's new energy code.

The state's new energy codes maintain the state's leadership position on building energy codes, and also re-aligns the Stretch Energy Code with the Base Code, simplifying the situation in Stretch Code Communities. This is important for professionals in the green building industry, so you can become update with the changes for commercial buildings, and the pros/cons of compliance options.

Of course, USGBC MA's devotion to education won't stop here. In the future, we will be holding more events similar to this!

If you're interested in emerging practices to get you ahead of the game, our Healthy Materials Summit is only a month away. Also in October, we will be holding an educational session with EnerNOC to go over details regarding renewable energy.