Are you about to renovate and want to donate your building materials but don’t know if that’s possible? Well it is and there are companies that will welcome your donation and provide financial incentive to do so. Donating your building materials is (generally) tax-deductible, saves you disposal fees, helps NYC reduce the amount of waste going to landfills, and helps folks build a green industry!

We’ll be talking about reusing and recycling building materials at the August 19 “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Retrofit” session of the Green Building Monthly Forum!

Read on for a list of places that will take your donation of building materials! (more…)

Did you guess this chair was first an old bourbon barrel?? If you’re anything like me and want to combine your love affair of modern contemporary home furnishings with a desire to be green, you should definitely check out  Uhuru (Pronounced: oo-hoo-roo) in Red Hook, Brooklyn - yes in NY!! I came across this place a while ago. Uhuru is a small, design build furniture company that uses materials that have been reclaimed, recycled, re-purposed, reused, or otherwise rejected from their original function. Uhuru has recently been named one of Greenopia’s Distinguished sustainable companies for New York City for 2008-2009.

GreenHomeNYC does not receive fees from the purveyors of products or services mentioned in its blog posts.

I own a brownstone in Brooklyn and want to have an energy audit and a review of ways to make the building greener in general. Can you offer any recommendations of programs, companies, consultants that do this? Does the city have any incentives or programs to help?
-Kippy

Kippy,
The short answer is yes — there are programs, consultants, etc to help you evaluate green renovations for your brownstone. (more…)

I work at a large, well-known internet company and would like to approach the powers that be with a proposal to implement sustainable business practices that will save them money. Where can I go to find information to back up and support such a proposal? Also, do you know of a place in New York City where I can obtain training on conducting energy audits?
-Michelle

Hello Michelle,
We focus mostly on residential green building, but that’s no excuse! Helpful resources regarding sustainable business practices include the http://www.thegreengrid.org web site and http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=prod_development.server_efficiency. The former is an industry consortium on greening data center operations, and the latter is an EPA-sponsored effort addressing data center energy efficiency. As for training for conducting energy audits, you can check out AEA’s training programs (http://www.aeanyc.org/site/c.dhJJJTOzFoH/b.1676911/). There are also other training programs that let you earn a Building Performance Institute certification, but they happen occasionally and not necessarily on a predictable schedule. You can check the web site of Steven Winter Associates (swinter.com) to see if they plan to offer classes soon.

Here are three questions from a student at Rutgers who was working on a paper about the costs, benefits, and barriers of retrofitting affordable housing to improve energy efficiency:

1. Are the tenants of green affordable homes seeing true savings?
2. Are they increasing awareness about other environmental issues to communities that normally wouldn’t?
3. How are policies creating incentives for developers to build green when the savings goes mostly to the tenants?

These are good questions and ones that are difficult to get definitive (or in my case, short) answers. (more…)