While advanced technologies and green building standards like LEED certification have helped to make many new construction projects über-efficient and energy-smart, it turns out that the greenest building of all really is — as architect Carl Elefante has said — “one that is already built.”

A new, first-of-its-kind, detailed analysis shows why, in most cases, renovating an old building in the right way is usually far more environmentally responsible than new construction, even new construction built to the highest, greenest standards.

“(I)t takes 10 to 80 years for a new building that is 30 percent more efficient than an average-performing existing building to overcome, through efficient operations, the negative climate change impacts related to the construction process,” according to “The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse,” a new report from the Preservation Green Lab of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

For example, if the city of Portland, Oregon, were to renovate and “reuse” all the single-family homes and commercial office buildings that are instead likely to be demolished over the next 10 years, it could cut its carbon dioxide emissions by about 231,000 metric tons. That’s around 15 percent of the entire county’s carbon reduction goals over the next decade.

On a global basis, the potential benefits of building reuse are even more jaw-dropping, simply because of the sheer number of buildings torn down every year. According to the Brookings Institution, nearly one-fourth of all the buildings in existence — covering a total area of some 82 billion square feet — are likely to be demolished and replaced between 2005 and 2030.

The National Trust study compared the potential impacts of remodeling/retrofitting versus demolishing/new construction for six different types of buildings in four different climate zones and found just one instance in which a new building is greener than an old one. Compared to putting up a brand-new multifamily housing project, converting a warehouse to multifamily residential has an environmental footprint that’s between 1 and 6 percent higher.

Of course, there are always caveats. A new building would have to be about the same size, and serve about the same purpose, as an old one to ensure the old-is-better results. Renovations need to use sustainable materials and methods to be green. And, despite the many benefits it offers, building reuse alone won’t help us cut our carbon footprints by the total amount we need.

Finally, there will always be times when renovating an old building just isn’t an option.

“First, the continued use of certain older buildings may be impractical for a number of reasons,” the National Trust study states. “An existing building may not suit a new proposed use that makes sense in the context of its neighborhood, or geographical impracticalities may render reuse unrealistic, e.g. as in the case of many vacant buildings in depopulating cities. Secondly, changing demographics and the evolution of vibrant, successful urban spaces will continue to necessitate new construction. Even so,
a paradigm shift is needed to account for the relative environmental benefits of reuse and to ensure that reuse be seriously considered in decisions regarding demolition and new construction.”

Water utilities, like electricity companies, are trying to meet the challenge by adopting “smart” technology that measures, monitors and manages every last drop flowing through their systems. That’s not always easy, considering the water infrastructure in many parts of Europe, the US and elsewhere are aging and prone to failure … even moreso than power grids.

Adding a layer of “smart” onto even outdated water systems, though, can help bring service into the 21st century. In India, for example, a residential water meter upgrade in Delhi is aimed at — for the first time — getting actual measurements, rather than estimates, for how much water people are using. In a city where more than half of water customers have either a defective meter or no meter at all, those kinds of measurements could help prevent a tremendous amount of water waste.

In water-stressed Australia, an updated metering system in the remote town of Kalgoorlie is designed to not only identify water leaks in a place where every drop counts, but to send automatic alerts to the utility so those can be repaired as quickly as possible. Other cities in the country are pursuing similar upgrades, funded through the Australian government’s National Water Security Plan for Cities and Towns program.

Another advanced metering system being deployed in parts of the US can measure very low flows of water, again with the goal of identifying leaks early, before too much water goes to waste. The iPerl technology, developed by Sensus, not only helps water companies get smarter about resource management, but is itself smart: a solid-state design with no moving parts, and made of recyclable materials.

In a world where population growth, rising urbanization and climate change are all putting pressure on supplies of clean, fresh water for drinking and other uses, water quality controls will also have to become a whole lot smarter. After all, if large numbers of us become dependent on drinking reclaimed wastewater — as a recent report from the US National Research Council (NRC) suggested — we’ll want plenty of reassurances that it’s safe to do so.

“The very nature of water reuse suggests that nearly any substance used or excreted by humans has the potential to be present at some concentration in the treated product,” the NRC report stated. “Modern analytical technology allows detection of chemical and biological contaminants at levels that may be far below human and environmental health relevance.”

That’s a major oversight, considering all the sustainability challenges related to the marine environment:

• There is, of course, ever more dissolved carbon dioxide and the increasing acidity of ocean water — both effects of rising atmospheric carbon levels and both a threat to numerous species of marine life.
• Then there’s the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch,” a wide swath of trash that swirls slowly in the North Pacific Ocean Gyre. (There’s one in the Atlantic as well.)
• Now, scientists have identified yet another source of ocean pollution: “microplastics” believed to be released by synthetic-fiber clothing during washing. Wastewater with these tiny bits of polyester and acrylic “smaller than the head of a pin” eventually ends up in the world’s oceans, where that plastic appears to be entering the food chain.
• The Earth’s biosphere-ocean nitrogen cycle has also been pushed past a dangerous tipping point, with nutrient-rich runoff from fertilized agricultural lands creating more than 400 oxygen-poor “dead zones” in the world’s oceans, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“A worldwide transition to a low-carbon, resource-efficient green economy will not be possible unless the seas and oceans are a key part of these urgently needed transformations,” states the UNEP report, “Green Economy in a Blue World.”

The report offers a number of recommendations for making oceans are included in the economic equation:

• Better recognition of the oceans’ ecosystem services in policy planning and investment decisions, and better pricing of ocean-based goods and services.
• Stronger ocean science to identify the many little-understood “links and dependencies in the marine environment.”
• Better regional and global frameworks to overcome limited power of individual governments to fight the “tragedy of the commons” affecting the world’s oceans.
• A move away from “brown-economy” subsidies that harm the oceans and their resources.
• An economic vision that considers not just GDP but issues like equity, security, maintenance of natural capital and other benefits to society.

“Greening our ocean economies is a challenge that needs commitment from each of us — as the individual consumer, investor, entrepreneur or politician,” the report concludes. “For countries, greening their marine economies means diversification, stronger resilience to economic or environmental shocks and sustainable prosperity.”

New research from chemical engineers at Pennsylvania State University, though, has identified a simpler and more affordable way to harness Moringa’s purification powers.

The secret, according to Stephanie B. Velegol and her colleagues, lies with adding an extract from the seeds — which contains a positively charged protein — to negatively charged sand. The resulting “functionalized sand,” or “f-sand,” not only helps to kill bacteria in water but helps to remove them as sediment.

The process makes it possible to produce clean, storable water for drinking using just seeds and sand.

One problem with previous methods for using Moringa seeds is that, used alone, the seeds also release other proteins and organic matter into the water. Those materials can eventually encourage new pathogens to grow, preventing the ability to store the treated water safely for later use. The new method of adding sand eliminates that concern by depositing the proteins on sand, which can then be removed through a rinsing process.

“Overall, these results open the possibility that (f-sand) can provide a simple, locally sustainable process for producing storable drinking water,” the researchers write.

Currently, some one billion people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America rely on untreated surface water sources for their daily drinking and cooking needs. An estimated two million people — most of them children under the age of five — die from water-borne diseases every year.

A group of global businesses have begun working together to look for innovative answers to those problems. Along the way, they’re hoping to find solutions that are not only environmentally responsible but can help their own businesses grow … a double-pronged challenge, to be sure.

The Innovations in Environmental Sustainability Council, formed by IBM and the World Environment Center, plans to hold its first meeting in Orlando next month.

The idea behind the council is to help members share information and learn from one another about how to incorporate sustainability efforts into business strategies and corporate practice. By collaborating in this way, the companies participating hope to make their organizations more efficient and effective, while also finding new ways to develop opportunities for growth.

“(W)e are always interested in how today’s best practices can transform sustainability in business,” said Wayne Balta, IBM’s vice president of Corporate Environmental Affairs and Product Safety.  “Innovation goes a long way to accelerate sustainability, and we look forward to collaborating with other like-minded companies.”

Charter members of the council will include Boeing, CH2M HILL, The Coca-Cola Company, The Dow Chemical Company, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, General Motors, IBM, Johnson & Johnson Family of Consumer Companies, The Walt Disney Company and WEC.

California’s North County Transit District (NCTD) is implementing Oracle’s environmental accounting and reporting software as part of its sustainability efforts. Angela Miller, the agency’s chief technology officer/chief sustainability officer, will discuss why her organization is taking that route during a live, interactive webcast set for Thursday, Jan. 26.

Click here to register for the webinar now.

The NCTD provides public transportation for North San Diego County, and moves more than 12 million passengers a year. To help track and manage its environmental and sustainability goals, it is implementing Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Environmental Accounting & Reporting module.

Before any company can report on what it’s doing to become more sustainable, it needs to gather data … and lots of it.  But simply presenting a mass of information in its raw form won’t tell anybody much about how well an organization is doing. To deliver a clear, complete picture of its eco-focused efforts, a business needs first to effectively manage, analyze and report the environmental data it’s gathered. And if it can do that automatically, all the better.

Effective environmental reporting helps show customers, partners and regulators exactly what a company is doing in sustainability, and how successfully it’s doing so. But the right applications can do more than just enhance transparency. They can also help an organization identify new opportunities for cost savings and other benefits, and to build its reputation as a sustainable brand.

Jon Chorley and Rich Kroes of Oracle will also be on hand during the Jan. 26 webinar to highlight the key features and benefits of the modules for both Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.

The webinar is aimed at sustainability and corporate responsibility teams, facilities owners, IT leaders, risk and compliance officers, and business operations and finance executives.

To learn more about the webinar, click here.

It’s not money that’s standing in the way, the IEA says in this video. Nor is it an inadequate supply of clean energy. Instead, the three things we need — but don’t have enough of, so far — to build a sustainable energy future will sound familiar to anyone who despairs while watching many of today’s political leaders in action (or, frequently, inaction): determination, creativity and courage.

Corrupt or hapless politicians aren’t the world’s only worry, though, says the “Global Risks 2012″ report from the World Economic Forum. Based on the results of surveys, workshops and interviews involving forum stakeholders, this year’s study explores the potential for major global risks in five areas: economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological.

In the technology sphere, for example, “critical systems failure” is singled out as the one risk with the greatest potential impact on society. Cyberattacks, on the other hand, are the threat with the greatest probability of occurring.

Other technological risks identified by the World Economic Forum are (in descending order of risk): massive incident of data fraud or theft, mineral resource supply vulnerability, massive digital misinformation, failure of intellectual property regime, proliferation of orbital debris, unintended consequences of climate change mitigation, unintended consequences of new life science technologies and unintended consequences of nanotechnology.

The forum report closes with three key conclusions:

• Decision-makers need to better understand how incentives can improve global collaboration and response to risks;
• Trust, or lack of trust, in leaders is a crucial factor in how risks might manifest themselves; and
• The public needs better, more transparent and meaningful communication and information sharing on the risks they might face.

“The more complex the system, the greater the risk of systemic breakdown, but also the greater the potential for opportunity,” notes Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. “Together, we have the foresight and collaborative spirit to shape our global future and particularly the survival instinct to move from pure urgency-driven risk management to more collaborative efforts aimed at strengthening risk resilience to the benefit of global society.”

But simply presenting a mass of information in its raw form won’t tell anybody much about how well an organization is doing. To deliver a clear, complete picture of its eco-focused efforts, a company needs first to effectively manage, analyze and report the environmental data it’s gathered. And if it can do that automatically, all the better.

That’s what California’s North County Transit District (NCTD) aims to do with the help of Oracle’s environmental accounting and reporting software. The agency’s chief technology officer/chief sustainability officer plans to discuss why her organization is taking that route during a live, interactive webcast set for Thursday, Jan. 26.

Click here to register for the webinar now.

Effective environmental reporting helps show customers, partners and regulators exactly what a company is doing in sustainability, and how successfully it’s doing so. But the right applications can do more than just enhance transparency. They can also help an organization identify new opportunities for cost savings and other benefits, and to build its reputation as a sustainable brand.

During the Jan. 26 webinar, the NCTD’s Angela Miller will discuss what drove her agency to look for a way to automate its environmental reporting process … and why it chose Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Environmental Accounting & Reporting module to achieve its goals.

Jon Chorley and Rich Kroes of Oracle will also be on hand to highlight the key features and benefits of the modules for both Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.

The webinar is aimed at sustainability and corporate responsibility teams, facilities owners, IT leaders, risk and compliance officers, and business operations and finance executives.

The NCTD provides public transportation for North San Diego County, and moves more than 12 million passengers a year.

To learn more about the webinar, click here.

Why not?

Buildings around the world account for a major portion of our energy consumption, and the choice of facade materials can make a big difference between a clean, green structure and a polluting, brown one. So if you want to build one of the greenest, most sustainable and most energy efficient cities on the planet, it’s vital to know which materials to pick and which to avoid.

That’s why Masdar — Abu Dhabi’s clean-energy initiative — plans to establish a facade test center as part of its über-green Masdar City project. To do it right, it’s partnering with Germany’s Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, which already operates just such a test center near Munich.

“Sustainable building materials’ testing is a leading item on the Masdar City technology roadmap as we believe this is an area where we can provide technology leadership to the region,” said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of Masdar.

Each test room at the Masdar center will allow for facade materials to be measured for energy code values, thermal and light transmission properties and overall performance. Construction is expected to start by the first quarter of 2012.