By Kristin Brubaker Head of Sustainable Construction Services Most green building events are built around long panels and slow build-ups. The BE+ Tech Forum is not. Built Environment Plus held its Tech Forum in Boston on Thursday, August 6, and the format moved fast: three rooms running at once, roughly fifteen lightning talks per room,…

by Lauren Breckenridge, LEED AP Sustainability Associate at Green Badger This year’s Advancing Construction Decarbonization conference had one theme running underneath nearly every session, whether the topic was Scope 3 reporting, LEED v5, or waste diversion: decarbonization only works if you can prove it. Teams have ambitious targets, but the numbers to back them up are…

by Wiley Gross Sustainability Associate at Green Badger Nobody got into project management because they love chasing paperwork. Yet here you are, opening an RFP that asks you to report embodied carbon, a line item that wasn’t on the bid form a few years ago and now sits next to your schedule and budget like…

by Lauren Breckenridge, LEED AP Sustainability Associate at Green Badger Somewhere in California right now, a project engineer on a 55,000-square-foot tilt-up is Googling “what is a GWP limit” three weeks before a submittal deadline. Here’s how to make sure that’s not your team. CALGreen’s embodied carbon requirements now apply to any nonresidential project of 50,000…

Every year, many architecture firms approach the AIA Materials Pledge the same way they approach taxes. They know the reporting deadline is coming, but the work doesn’t really begin until reporting season arrives. By then, product documentation is scattered across project folders, manufacturer websites have changed, substitutions have happened during construction, and project teams are…

By Kristin Brubaker Head of Sustainable Construction Services If you have ever managed LEED documentation on a construction project, you know the drill. You send out a friendly request for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). You wait. You send a reminder. You wait some more. You get a few PDFs, half of them are the wrong…

By Kristin Brubaker Head of Sustainable Construction Services The green building industry is accelerating, and the conversations happening at green building events right now reflect that urgency. Last night, the USGBC New Jersey chapter hosted its Transformation event at Lord Abbott’s headquarters in Jersey City, one of the most fitting venues imaginable. The office is…

by Lauren Richardson Sustainability Manager at Green Badger How LEED v5 Materials Credits connect to the circular economy movement, reshaping the region A circular economy is a system designed to keep materials in use for as long as possible rather than discarding them. In the traditional model, things follow a straight line: you take raw…

by Lauren Breckenridge, LEED AP Sustainability Associate at Green Badger Last week I had the opportunity to attend Engineering News-Record Groundbreaking Women in Construction conference, GWIC for short, in San Diego, and I am still thinking about it days later, which is honestly the best sign that a conference was worth attending. A Room Full of…

If you caught one of our working group sessions on the next version of the Contractor’s Commitment at this year’s USGBC California conference, you already know the conversation is heating up. If you missed it, we’ve got the recap. The short version: sustainability reporting is getting more rigorous, but the changes coming in Version 3.0…