We are pleased to have Advisory Board member, Gregory Arkin, share his thoughts today in his first guest post for Build2Sustain. You can find out more about Greg on the B2S Team page.
"A chance to define our process when it comes to assessing and designing sustainable building solutions keeping ROI and payback in the foreground. We also get to test the idea of open sourcing and crowd sourcing solutions when it comes to green retrofit and design. In essence we are developing how we will retrofit buildings across the country in an open way. We want the entire community to be part of fixing our existing commercial real estate. We feel the problem is just that large."
"Build2Sustain operates as a construction consultant. That is to say our role is to coordinate the project, manage the timeline and deliverables, facilitate communication between stakeholders, maintain transparency of process, develop sustainability strategy, and of course recruit team members."
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An estimated 10%-15% of Construction Cost is attributed to rework. That is work that has to be redone because of miscommunication from the client or the design team or because of an error by a contractor. That cost is baked into to all well written construction contracts, it's an unexplained tax on building something. It's not malicious or deceitful, simply put people make mistakes, and those (usually) minor mistakes can add up to serious cost."
I wanted to start my first Build2Sustain guest post with a couple of snippets from previous posts from James Bedell. I've had my own blog for 3 years now and almost hit 1,000 posts last year. Yet, when I asked to write my first guest post, I was stumped as to what to write about. When I asked Raquel for a topic, she said just to write something about green renovation and retrofit. Well, that's an easy topic for me, but how do I put my spin on it and top any of the posts that James has written. Not an easy task.
I'm in Las Vegas at the moment attending an annual software conference for Autodesk. Much of what I'm learning about in the sessions can't be disclosed just yet, but some of the hot topics are BIM for Construction, Sustainability and Rapid Energy Modeling. Looking at the snippets above, I see the words ROI, designing sustainable building solutions, coordinate the project, transparency, rework, miscommunication, error, mistakes and costs. Wow, that's a lot. Meanwhile, it's 6:30am, the house I'm staying in has the worst insulation because I'm freezing inside while it's 46 degrees out and they won't turn on the heat. I could swear Vegas was built in the desert. Did I mention the 40 million light bulbs flashing 24 hours a day outside each hotel and restaurant. I've never seen such an energy consuming town in my life. Ironic that our conference is here and discussing many of the topics that Build2Sustain is focusing on.
I'm going to make it my goal to do everything I can from the software and technology side to help James and the team find the most efficient and economical ways retrofit existing buildings and create new sustainable designs. I've been working with some newer design technologies that were amazing, and with what I saw yesterday, will make all of our work even easier in the near future. Between the new requirements of LEED 3.0, energy audit requirements, green washing, documentation, coordination, and "there's no way I'm going to share my drawings with the contractor", the world has rapidly changed in the design, engineering and construction process. I'm a technology, efficiency and automation evangelist. Resistance is futile to the new technologies that are available to all of us to make the world more sustainable.
It won't be easy. There are a lot of new things to learn. Status quo just won't cut it with the goals of Build2Sustain and many others. There's a learning curve. It's a different approach. It requires math, sharing of ideas, designs, data and you have to leave your ego at the door. If you read this blog regularly, then you're already on board. Someone yesterday was talking about the recent earthquakes around the world. I said, it's because of the ice melting on the polar caps, that reducing the weight on the tectonic plates, that's causing them to shift, thus creating the earthquakes. I just made that up and I really hope that I'm wrong about that theory. If by some chance I'm right, we really need to speed up our plans for sustainability and retrofits.
I look forward to posting again soon with a lot more specifics. Again, rereading the top three paragraphs, I hope to do my part to share my experiences and the workflow and processes to make us all a lot more consultative and have a lot less paperwork to deal with. Thank you.
Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 10:24PM 
From Green Building Law Blog: TD Bank Goes Carbon Neutral
The estimable Shari Shapiro talked with Frank Sherman of TD Bank about their decision to become carbon neutral.
A brief excerpt:
There's much more in the interview about primary strategy and implemenation. Mr. Sherman even touches on green building. Great piece, Shari!
I neglected to mention the gbNYC also did a piece on TD's carbon neutrality that's also worth a read.