Since the Green Building Certification Institute announced big changes to the LEED Accredited Professional (LEED AP) program (chronicled here), a few other key items have come out.

First, the final date to register for the LEED AP exam in its current form has been set at March 31, 2009. The final date for "exam retirement" has not been set (meaning you can take the exam after that date, as long as you're registered), but is expected to be late May or June 2009.

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From the Father of Green Chemistry to that guy from This Old House, a couple dozen videos of speakers and presentations from Greenbuild '08 have been posted at Greenbuild 365, "USGBC's interactive green building learning portal."

Among them, there's a very special episode in particular. You may have heard that our own Alex Wilson received a Leadership Award from the USGBC during Greenbuild. (Okay, the story's getting old, but the quality keeps getting better.) Check out Mister Wilson now!

Happy holidays!

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I'm not usually all that comfortable in front of a camera, but I had fun walking the Greenbuild 2008 Expo floor with a video crew from CNNMoney.com and Fortune magazine.

We focused on four or five technologies in our tour, only two of which made it into the final two minute video (after a nice lead-in by Scot Horst of 7group). The CNN crew were looking for photogenic presentations, while I was looking for products I believe in to talk about. I'm pleased with how it came out in the end — though it would have been nice to cover a lot more stuff!

You find the darndest things on YouTube sometimes. Southwest Windpower, the maker of the Skystream 3.7 small-scale wind turbine, brought this video (and others like it) to my attention.

In 1997, humorist Dave Barry wrote a newspaper piece titled "The Toilet Police," about those newly mandated 1.6-gallon low-flow toilets that honestly and truly deserved to be dumped on. The column is still floating around the internet, and clearly people are still moved by it. But, y'know, that was over a decade ago. There are still crappy toilets to be had, just like there are lousy products of all sorts readily available, but smart toilet makers have strained to get the kinks out to the point that a one-gallon flush can outperform some of those old three-and-a-half-gallon water-hogs. It looks like Dave is still making a stink with that old log, judging from his website.

But an exploding toilet under almost any circumstance is entertaining.

A number of the most efficient commercial and residential toilets available are listed in GreenSpec; the state-of-the-industry and the standards considered by its research team are described as follows:

Since 1992, federal law has mandated that nearly all new toilets use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf) — the exception being commercial blow-out toilets, which are still allowed to use 3.5 gallons in some states. As toilet flushing is the largest single use of water in most residential and commercial buildings (accounting for up to 40% of residential use), water savings from toilet replacement is very significant.

In addition to improvements to the traditional gravity system, pressure- and vacuum-assisted flushing systems have been developed that offer superior performance, albeit with the addition of some noise. Dual-flush toilets have been available for years overseas and are now making inroads in the U.S. These save additional water by making two flushes available: one for solid wastes and a lower-volume flush for liquids and paper.

Products listed here must meet the minimum standards of the Uniform North American Requirements (UNAR) for toilets, which includes elements of the Maximum Performance (MaP) flush-quality testing protocol and Los Angeles Supplementary Purchase Specification (SPS), which discourages the use of toilets that might be adjusted to use significantly more water. Products listed here use at least 20% less than the federal minimum of 1.6 gallons (6 liters) per flush — that is, 1.28 gallons (4.8 liters) or less. The toilet must also evacuate at least 350 grams of solid waste per flush, as tested under the Maximum Performance (MaP) protocol. Toilets that are included without MaP testing are extremely low-water use or have other unique green features. For dual-flush toilets, we factor water savings by averaging the high and low volume flush levels. Two reduced flushes and one full flush cannot average more than 1.28 gallons per flush. Other factors considered in GreenSpec evaluations include bowl washing effectiveness and water surface area.

Want more? Of course you do. See "All About Toilets," an archived feature story from Environmental Building News.

A post went up on Treehugger a couple days ago about "an eco alternative to plug-in exit signs" — photoluminescents. I posted the following reply there, and thought I'd just as well share it here, too.

Environmental Building News (where I work) reported on photoluminescent exit signs in 2006. With tens of millions of exit signs deployed in North America that use up to 350 kWh each annually (as much as a nicely efficient refrigerator), it's a big deal. EPA estimates are that exit signs in commercial buildings use 30 - 35 billion kWh per year... the output of about a dozen 1000-MW coal-fired power plants.

CFL exit signs use far less power and require far fewer lamp change-outs than incandescent. LED exit signs use only a couple watts. Electroluminescent signs use even less power than LEDs. Electricity-free radioluminescent exist signs — the tritium ones noted in another comment — have been around since the '20s, generally have 5 - 20 year lifespans, and disposal is regulated in the U.S. by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (though it's probably a given that most of them end up in landfills anyway).

And PL exit signs, as noted in the post, also need no power at all... sort of.

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This is the really slick two-minute video that was projected onto the giant auditorium screens just before our own Alex Wilson was given a USGBC Leadership Award during Greenbuild. Get a sense of our offices in the historic Estey Organ Factory... see some of the faces behind the work... and meet Roxy Wilson, the Retriever...

I found myself near Washington, D.C., on the day after Thanksgiving. Rather than try to prop up the economy at retail outlets or lounge in a hotel room all day, I headed to the National Building Museum to see its "Green Community" exhibit with my mother and sister.

Appropriately, we took the light rail system into the city. Coming up an escalator from the subway tunnels, we saw the museum framed perfectly: an old brick building designed with grand proportions and deep windowsills to keep out the summer sun.

Having heard about other exhibits at the museum, I was expecting "Green Community" to be larger than it was. The exhibit, which will remain up through October 2009, took up a single room in the museum. That room, however, contained a wealth of information on how communities can be greener, presented in both statistical and case study form. I was already familiar with much of the information in the exhibit, but thought it was presented quite well. My mother and sister, less familiar with the concepts, found the exhibit very interesting--it even provoked lunch conversation about sustainable communities!

My favorite part of the exhibit was a solar panel in a window hooked up to a meter showing how much energy it was producing. It was only a sample of what could be done in the building, and would never produce much energy, but it made the implications of retrofitting solar power very real. I wish the exhibit had included more examples of technologies that could be used to green communities: a model of a proposed transit system, for example, or a model of a cogeneration plant showing how it could be used to heat and power homes. It's one thing to note that such technology has been used in several places throughout the world, but it's quite another to teach a visitor how the technology really works. If a visitor understands the actual technology, it's easier to bring the concept back to his or her hometown and (hopefully) implement it there.