Smog-Eating Buildings?!

The 'Green' movement has been making great strides over the past few years, but there is some concern that all is not as green as it seems. *Greenwashing is at times hard to detect and there is controversy over some of the rating systems used to gauge the sustainability of a a product. For example, the bamboo floor craze. It seems everyone was putting in bamboo because it was a renewable product. Bamboo can be ready for harvest within 3-7 years versus almost 100 years for some hardwood species. However, if the bamboo floors you are putting in your newly remodeled home are coming from China, there is the carbon footprint of the transportation overseas, then to the distributor, and then to you. There are entire computer programs dedicated to life-cycle analysis that determine the hundreds of factors that can come into play for a single product (and now you are putting hundreds of products into a single home). You can see easily you can mistake greenwashing for green.

*When it comes to pollution, "buildings in the United States contribute 38.9 percent of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions, including 20.8 percent from the residential sector and 18.0 percent from the commercial sector (2008)." 38.9%! That is a whole lot of pollution. 

But then comes our superhero, Innovation! I am amazed by the number of products featured in the last few issues of Architectural Record that actually reduce carbon/smog/air impurities. While I will not claim to have run extensive computer aided life-cycle analysis studies on these products, I will say that they grabbed my attention and they definitely had me saying 'wow!' One such product is Nedlaw Living Walls. Using the, "patented biofilter technology and a building's own air handling system....[it] breaks down and removes airborne pollutants. Off-gases. Odours. Chemicals. They aren't just filtered, they're quantifiably eliminated. It's the same biological processes used by nature outdoors, brought indoors. Beautifully." And these walls are beautiful. Especially when we spend so much of our time indoors and the research related to plants, outdoor views and increased productivity are pretty (no pun intended) astounding.

 University of Guelph Humber

Another product is Reynobond with EcoClean. Now this one gets a little complicated and you may have to brush up on your chemistry, but I will give it to you in layman's terms after all the fancy lingo. "When Nitrogen Oxcide molecules float near the surface of Reynobond with EcoClean, they are attacked by free radicals generated from the titanium dioxide reaction with water and oxygen in the air--oxiding the NOx molecules and converting them to harmless nitrate." Huh? So basically using a naturally occurring chemical reaction, the Reynobond coated product leverages the use of sunlight, water vapor, and oxygen in the air to clean the very air itself. 

Los Angles High School #9 (Reynobond coated panels were used in construction)

If that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, check out their website: www.alcoa.com/bcs/aap_eastman/ecoclean/en/home.asp

And here is the NedLaw website while i'm at it: www.naturaire.com

The gist is that in order to create anything energy has to be used in one form or another. It comes down a complicated combination of how much energy, water, and other renewable resources a product takes to be produced as well as how much it takes to get it to the consumer, the actual life-cycle, and what we can do with it when it is ready to be replaced. I am all for a product that, while it may take some effort to produce, upon creation (and application) will begin to purify the area around it for the term of its life. And if it looks good doing it too, well hell, that's the best of both worlds; form and function.


*Greenwashing (a compound word modelled on "whitewash"), or ""green sheen"",^[1][2] is a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that a company's policies or products are environmentally friendly.

*http://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/pubs/gbstats.pdf