Tag: water-management

October 14, 2013

The Green Spotlight on BE NYC: Steve Bluestone

Countdown to BE NYC! With only2days until the conference, GreenHomeNYC is shining the spotlight on the experts who will be making the BE NYC an exceptional industry event!   One of the professionals participating in the conference is Steve Bluestone.    Steve-Headshot-2-copySteve Bluestone is a partner in The Bluestone Organization, a real estate development, contracting, and property management firm founded by his grandfather, Jacob Bluestone, in 1927.  Mr. Bluestone studied architecture and passive and active solar energy systems, earning a B.S. in environmental science from Marlboro College.  Since entering the construction and development industry, he has led his firm’s efforts on research and implementation of green building design.  Using off-the-shelf components, the firm produced a 50-unit rental building that was hailed as “the most energy efficient multi-family building in New York State with four or more units,” and did so at conventional construction cost levels.  Steve lives with his wife in Westchester County in a passive solar, geothermally-heated and cooled home that they designed and built in 2000.  They are in the process of building an innovative new house upstate that is destined to be net zero energy and Passive House certified.   Steve is a speaker within the Small Buildings Track of BuildingEnergy NYC 2013.   (more…)

October 1, 2013

The Green Spotlight: Jordan Bonomo

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAJordan Bonomo is a Multifamily Energy Auditor at Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation (NMIC), a long time GreenHomenNYC volunteer, head of the Green Building Tours,  and a  Student in Columbia University’s Sustainability Management graduate program   GreenHomeNYC’s blog mentions that your interest in the environment was sparked while working on a climate change campaign for MASSPIRG.  Please recount this experience as well as others that have contributed to your interest in the environment and sustainable building. After college I was living in Boston for the summer.  MASSPIRG, the state public interest research group there, was working on a climate change campaign to get Massachusetts to ratify the RGGI Bill.  The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a carbon cap-and-trade system for the Northeast states.  I helped fundraise for that where I learned about the issue and the politics involved.  It was also the summer that the Al Gore Movie, An Inconvenient Truth, came out.  It was a very hot topic at the time.  The initiative eventually went through in Massachusetts . Living in New York City, obviously there are a lot of buildings.  I know that buildings are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the city and a lot of the city’s energy use is from buildings.  I thought that would be a great starting point for focusing on being more efficient and more sustainable.   Please describe how you became involved in GreenHomeNYC. I randomly googled green buildings in NYC and came across GreenHomeNYC.  I shot them an email and went to meetings and met other people that were interested in the topics.  I didn’t know anything about it at all at the time but I started volunteering so that I would learn.  One of my first assignments was to make informational note cards that we would post on the website.  I did one about passive houses.  I researched passive houses, passive lighting, and passive heating systems.  This was a good way to learn about one aspect of green building and now it’s a pretty hot topic everywhere.  It was cool, a good way to get my feet wet. (more…)