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Earth Advantage News
Junked Cars Morph into Green Manufactured Houses
by Ruth Mullen,
The Oregonian
February 26, 2009
What do you get when you put five engineers alone in a room for a year and give them a problem to solve?
Rob Boydstun got a revolutionary new product: affordable green housing.
Home Certified by Earth Advantage Institute
The president of Boydstun Metal Works has gone from building commercial car carriers to constructing manufactured green homes out of the crushed carcasses of junked vehicles. (About four to six cars per house.)
"I knew I needed to diversify in order to stay afloat," says Boydstun, who launched his start-up, Miranda Homes, about a year and a half ago. "Our goal was to build a home that is sustainable but also affordable."
Click here to read the full story.
Earth Advantage Institute: Sustainable Communities
By Don Lipper and Elizabeth Sagehorn
Builder/Architect
Winter, 2009
Many home builders and remodelers want to go green, they just don't know how. Earth Advantage, Inc. (EAI) is quickly becoming the centralized information source for people who want to build as environmentally responsibly as they can.
"The goal of our program is to help builders incorporate energy and environmentally sound measures, techniques and building products into a holistic strategy to build a high-performance home," says Randy Hansell, LEED for Homes Program Manager. Click here to read the full story.
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Around the World
Thomas Friedman urges U.S. to lead green revolution. In a lecture given at PSU last week, Friedman said that we're having a green party when we should be having a green revolution. Friedman suggested that America needs to lead the way, sharing a lifestyle that emphasizes less consumption of fossil fuels and material goods.
Sustainable companies have been found to outperform their peers by 15% during the financial crisis, according to a report by A.T. Kearney.
The second annual Green Collar Jobs report was produced in January by the American Solar Energy Society. Amidst the global economic downturn, the renewable energy market has tripled and could provide 16 to 37 million new jobs by 2030.
Google PowerMeter has been introduced as a Web application that will manage and display a home's energy use, broken down by individual appliance.
Britain plans to see all UK homes through a sustainability retrofit by 2030. With a goal of 400,000 homes updated by 2015, the UK will provide incentives for updating to low carbon technologies such as solar panels, biomass boilers, and ground source heat pumps.
Washington State Legislature has passed a bill to require the implementation of an energy performance score to rate residential energy use.
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