Good Design in Shipping Container Construction

Read an article of Treehugger while drinking my morning coffee, and was piqued by this post by Lloyd Alter.  Basically it was attacking some cabins made out of used shipping containers built by the Boy Scouts of America on Catalina Island.  And while most (or all) of what he said about those cabins was true, he then went on to attack shipping container construction in general.  That is what piqued me.

"It is about time for architects to face up to the reality that shipping containers are designed for freight, not people, and by the time you adapt them to people there is barely any shipping container left."

 Well, that may be true, but do wood frame construction houses look like a pile of 2x4s when they are done?  This is just a silly argument.  Even if you remove all the siding completely, you are still reusing the structural steel without going through a very high energy recycling process.  Also, this technique utilizes a material that is currently waste.  Empty, used shipping containers are piling up at all of our major ports and big cities, because it is more expensive to ship them back to where the goods come from than to manufacture new ones.  In what way is using them to build houses not better than using new steel?  Or conventional wood framing?  I am willing to stand corrected if someone can give me a good answer.

I know as well as anyone that most shipping container design looks pretty ugly, but just because many examples look like a bunch of shipping containers stacked into a big ugly box doesn't mean that it has to.  And really, is this any more ugly than the big steel and glass corporate power towers that have been popular in this country for so many decades?  No, it is just as ugly.  To say it was more ugly would be to diminish the legacy of Corbu.

Poorly designed shipping container construction is not the fault of the shipping container, it is the fault of the person designing it.  To prove my point, I will add a slide show of beautiful homes and buildings that use shipping containers as structural elements, right below my "about me" on my blog.  It should be up later today.

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I'm back! (where was I?)

Sorry to my many followers (that is, my family and a few old friends) for failing to post for so long. Lets face it, if there isn't money on the table it's hard to be reliable. So where was I for so long? Aside from the many illegitimate excuses for not blogging, there were a few good reasons (still trying to decide if being really sick was an excuse or a reason). Among them, I have been devouring the new LEED 2009 reference guide: "Green Building Design and Construction." I don't think I could explain it without boring the bejesus out of anyone who is not a LEED AP, but there are a lot of really good and important improvements in the new system.

That being said, I was very saddened today by a post on Boing Boing (the most read blog) about ClimateCounts, a dubiously motivated non-profit that rates fortune 500 companies on their 'greenness.' What saddened me was not the post, but the absolutely defeatist comments from the BB readers:

• "The very idea of "green" capitalism is a logical fallacy, and most of these companies have historically atrocious records of polluting the globe and abusing human rights. Those scores are useless, completely and uncompromisingly so."
• "The bottom line is that most of what we do to assuage our own environmental damage is pointless unless we are living off the grid in the woods growing our own food organically and wearing animal skins."

This pessimism about environmental issues is not serving anyone. It is probably true that these companies have a history of being environmental monsters, but does that mean change is impossible? Of course not. They may be reluctant, but many are making changes, and even incremental changes have a positive effect. And while I would agree that the fisrt marriage of capitalism and 'green' was nothing but pure marketing hogwash, I would not agree that green capitalism is a logical fallacy (and just to be a jerk, which logical fallacy would that be? post hoc? slipperty slope? hmmm...).

Capitalism is about economics, the green movement is about sustainability. Their goals might seem contradictory at times, but in reality they are two completely different fields which can be made to work together. The absurdity of the above argument is clear if you replace capitalism with other economic regimes: the statements 'green socialism is a fallacy,' and 'green mutualism is a fallacy' just don't make any sense. Economics and sustainability are not mutually exclusive in any way.

I am also a little tired of the concept that in order to be green you have to live in the wilderness, off the grid, and make clothes from the skin of dead animals (I wonder if that poster was imagining skins of domesticated food stock or hunting for those skins, either way not necessarily more sustainable than cotton fiber). Quite frankly, there isn't room in the wilderness for every person alive to have their own acre of farmable land, and there isn't enough natural groundwater to support that many farms indefinitely.

For better or worse, over half of the world's population are now city people, and that is why cities have become the focus of most green movements. We need a lot of infrastructure to support our current population, and spreading people out into the woods would mean more of that infrastructure, and all of it less efficient. That is why focusing on green development, renewable resources and sustainable energy is so important, and why this defeatist claptrap about it all being pointless is so damaging.

I admit that things look pretty bleak when you get down to it: CO2 has a long life in the atmosphere (exact numbers are difficult to come by) so even if we stopped burning anything right now, we would not reach stability for at least 50 years. Mercury has a much, much longer life in the oceans (it can cycle through the food chain many, many times before anything like safe deposition). But how could it possibly help to throw in the towel? So the solution isn't simple, isn't easy, and won't happen overnight. All the more reason to roll up our sleeves and get started.

EWEB green and solar homes tour

Yesterday I had the pleasure of helping out at EWEB for their Solar and Green Building Tour (part of the Solar Oregon program. I asked to help out early, so that I could take one of the tours and see some of the green homes Eugene was highlighting.

The first stop (for my group) was the Inkwell Building in Cresent Village, which won LEED Gold certification for the Core and Shell and LEED Platinum for the interior of their office. They followed LEED pretty much to the letter, and the result was a comfortable, beautiful office space. The rest of the tour consisted of three homes, each with completely different approaches to being green.

It was a really fun day, and I especially enjoyed talking with the builders and architects about what strategies they implemented to go green, and why they chose those over other possibilities. It was interesting to learn that many of my favorite methods for energy efficiency in Southern California were not always easy or effective to implement here.

For example, solar thermal water heaters are a snap in SoCal, but you have to purchase really high tech expensive ones in climates that drop below freezing for long periods in the winter. While one house chose to go with this option, the In-Law unit designed by Rainbow Valley did a cost analysis which showed that for their project it would take forever to pay off the initial expense (largely because it was a home for one person who only lived there part of the year). They chose a tankless water heater which was very efficient at providing the small amount of hot water needed.

In speaking with Alec from Rainbow Valley Design, he was lamenting how difficult it is to find valuable information about many of the "green" products available for builders. For example, he told me about a door they sourced which touted that it used locally harvested, sustainable wood. After he bought it, he found out that they did use local wood, but shipped that wood to China to be cut and assembled with cheap labor and then shipped it back. Well the point of local is that you aren't burning oil to ship it across the globe!

I told Alec about another builder on the tour who informed me that the hardwood floors in his house were green something or other certified, I had never heard of the certification he mentioned. I asked what that meant, he said "it's supposed to be better." I asked if it was FSC certified, he replied that he had no idea. So what's green about new maple if it isn't FSC certified?

My favorite home aesthetically speaking was the Sage House, by Arbor South Architecture. It was LEED Platinum, the highest rating offered by the US Green Building Council. The floors and some of the exterior features were done in beautiful re-purposed wood, and the structural beams were a glue lam product that I had not heard of before, which uses the chips and scraps from milling. They also used it as an interior design element to wonderful affect. The exterior features were redwood that was salvaged from the seats of an old theater through BRING Recycling, a fantastic local non-profit.

The In-Law I mentioned above, however, was great because of its extremely efficient use of a tiny square footage. Smaller homes are inherently green because they use less materials, cost less to heat and cool, and generate less waste. This place was 585 square feet, and it felt like at least 800. That is just good design.

The presence of a disabled man on the tour highlighted the issue of accessibility, which is usually not thought of as being a green issue. People get old. Sorry, everyone, that was a downer I know, but it is unavoidably true. People get old, they get injured, they slow down, sometimes they have children who are born with different abilities. Any honest assessment of the life cycle of a building should take this into account, plan for accessibility and easy mobility with a cane, a wheelchair, and even potential space for a care taker. It's not just about the current client, either, it is about resale and future owners.

The best house in terms of accessibility was definitely the "Earth Advantage House" built by David E. Smith. With wide hallways to accommodate wheel chairs and a roll in shower (no curb, just extra tiled floor for a wheelchair or walker to roll right in) in one bathroom, this house was certainly suited to the needs of any potential residents.

The tour finished up at La Perla, a new Pizzeria in town (of the fancy pizza variety) with really excellent, traditional wood oven cooked pizza. Their food was pretty fantastic, and I tortured Courtney by eating several slices in her presence (they had some wheat free food too, so she wasn't starving).

Thinking about the differences in local climate here and in SoCal and how they affect construction choices reminded me of some studies I had done for a sustainability class at UCLA that focused on Los Angeles City's practices, and looking back over them, I think maybe they deserve to see the light of day. So I think I may brush them off, fix them up, and publish them with google docs. If I follow through, I will link to it later.

That's it for now, bravo EWEB, and thanks to everyone who opened their homes and offices for us to see.

Used = Green

My wife and I stumbled upon an amazing fact up in Oregon: It is saturated with beautiful antique quality furniture. When we moved up at the beginning of the summer, we didn't want to bring all of our old baggage with us. We got rid of as much as we possibly could, including most of our furniture.

In looking for new furniture, we found that what worked in LA did not necessarily work in Eugene. Craigslist had some decent stuff, but it was pretty bleak compared to SoCal. Then we wandered into a St. Vincent de Paul, which I didn't know was a thing before we moved. We were both amazed, the thrift stores in Eugene are all packed with beautiful furniture. Stuff that would go for thousands of dollars in vintage shops on Melrose Blvd. was more like $100 bucks there.

Then, because Craigslist had to redeem itself, we came across a promising post. I believe all it said was "modern sofa," or something to that effect, and when my wife called, he said he had "s0me more modern stuff." When we arrived, there was a garage full of mid century modern furniture which this guy had culled from all over the Pacific North West. He also knew everything about modern design, and knew the designer of most of the pieces that he was offering. We furnished most of our living room out of his garage. Here are a few of the pieces that we got:

Dining set by Paul McCobb

Sofa by Umanoff, end table by Keal

Don't know designer, if you have any ideas please post in comments

I would be lying if I said that I was thinking about this at the time, but in retrospect this is the most sustainable way we could have furnished our new place, and it is also an excellent example of how you can save money being green. In the past, I have furnished apartments with a bunch of nice looking but really low quality cookie cutter furniture from Ikea and Target, and most of it eventually ended up in the trash.

Cheap furniture is really disposable furniture. When particle board warps, chips, cracks or breaks, it cannot really be repaired, and once it starts down that path it is not long before it ends its life in the landfill. It is usually designed to be put together only once, as well. Pre-drilled holes in the particle board and cam locks made of weak metal ensure that if you disassemble your Ikea desk, it will lose most of its structural integrity when you put it back together.

In the long run, cheap furniture ends up costing you more money, because you have to replace it more frequently. But unless you are paying more in taxes than I make in a year, antique quality furniture is way too expensive, and there isn't really much of an in between.

One great way to get around this dilemma is to buy used furniture. You can tell if it is well made pretty easily: if it is still solid after years of use it will probably be good for many more. Also, solid wood is really easy to repair. With a very small investment in wood glue, a few clamps, and maybe a power drill, you can keep solid wood pieces alive for decades.

Buying used stuff is more sustainable in two ways: first it reduces demand for more new stuff, which means that there is less energy being consumed to produce that new stuff, and second it keeps old stuff out of the waste stream. But more than being green, when you buy used you can afford to get better quality stuff; beautiful, well designed stuff that you will love. And if you love it, you will take care of it: fix it when it breaks and find a good h0me for it when it no longer fits in your life.

Different cities have different channels for finding good used stuff. The thrift stores in Eugene, for example, are a great resource, where in LA they have been completely picked over by people who buy the good stuff, fix it up, and sell it for 10 times as much out of little boutique shops. But, in Los Angeles, the stuff available on Craigslist and at yard sales can be amazing. One way or another, people are always changing their surroundings, and high quality used furniture is available for those who seek it.

Vinegar, Salt & Baking Soda: green cleaning

A big part of the green movement is about keeping the spaces in which we live and work healthy. One way to do this is to avoid buying products with toxic chemicals.

Most people these days have forgotten what our grandparents or great grandparents knew: most things can be cleaned and disinfected using distilled white vinegar, ordinary table salt, baking soda, or some combination of those things.

Vinegar kills bacteria and breaks up some stains and messes due to its acidity. Lemon juice works the same way. Either of these can be used to disinfect countertops or (with a little oil) to polish wood. Vinegar may smell a little harsh at first, but when it evaporates, there is no odor left. More here. Way more than you can possibly use in one lifetime here.

Salt kills bacteria by drawing all its water out, and this is why food has been preserved in salt for thousands of years. Also, the course grains can be used to scrub tough stains (such as pots and pans), especially with a little vinegar or other slightly acidic substance. More here.

Baking soda draws grease stains out of anything, and many commercial cleaning products have baking soda at their base. It can also be used (with vinegar) to break up simple clogs in kitchen and bathroom sinks. But, it is not very effective on really bad clogs. More here.

You can buy these items in bulk for practically nothing, and reduce your waste stream by replacing all of those small bottles of specialty cleaners. Imagine replacing all that junk under your sink with just a bag of salt, a box of Soda and a 5 gallon jug of vinegar. And instead of being toxic, all of these are things you can put in your food. You can literally eat a teaspoon of it with no negative impact to your health (I wouldn't do it though, it would probably be unpleasant).

I will be posting stories of successes and failures cleaning with these things in the future. Though probably not many failures: I have found very few messes that could not be cleaned using these three products.

Here we go...

Well, here we go. I have been planning on starting a blog for quite some time now, basically since I decided to start studying for the LEED exam and made the decision to become a green consultant.

My purpose here is to document all of the ways in my life that I am trying to go green. Sure, there are plenty of sources online to find similar information (treehugger.com, the Green Guide, etc.), but I figured that since I spend pretty much all of my time thinking about this stuff, it couldn't hurt to have one more person's spin on the situation.

With that in mind, I set out to create a space for a discussion about going green, why it is important, how we can do it in our day to day lives, and provide many (I hope) colorful anecdotes about how I am trying to go green, and when I fail, why.

I hope some folks out there finds this humble little blog useful and informative, and I thank you for spending your valuable time with me.

P.S. - Since this is my first blog, I would greatly appreciate any feedback. I am a novice in this world, and need all the help I can get.