Watch Climate of Doubt on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

This report focuses on property managers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and highlights retailers, products, and rebates that are specific for this area.  This report is by no means a final word on this topic.  The objective here is to create a guide and begin a forum for discussing how the environment can be included in the apartment context.

Sustainability is, and should indeed be, a popular topic right now.  We hear the word everywhere, and sometimes it seems to get tossed around so frequently that it starts to lose meaning.  Any company (or organization, or even individual) can claim to do their part when it comes to operating sustainably, but it may be wise to question them before taking them at their word.

The Daybreak community in Utah is taking sustainability seriously, and they’re making their efforts very clear to anybody interested in what that entails.

For starters, they are working closely in conjunction with Garbett Homes, who makes a point of using solar panels to generate energy for the houses that they build.  That in itself might not sound too revolutionary, but the real significance lies in the fact that this solar energy is built standard into each home that they construct, resulting in around 300 new homes per year taking advantage of sustainable energy.

We spoke to one solar-friendly resident while preparing this article, and she reported that her energy bill for one entire summer month was a measly $7.  (Just in case you think this resident is a significant exception, nearly all solar-friendly residents of Daybreak average between $10 and $15 per month for their energy bills.)

Daybreak is also the first community in Utah to require that every home be built to EPA Energy Star standards, and they are also the first community in the United States to require that all new homes be tested and rated by HERS (Home Energy Rating System).  In addition, the community is designed to maximize a car-free lifestyle, taking into account walking and biking distance for employees, shoppers and even elementary school children.  Their “5 Minute Rule” means that no resident will live further away than five minutes’ walking distance from a park or trail.

Sustainability is also being embraced by Daybreak in their standard, day to day practices.  After all, sustainable living doesn’t end when the home is built; it needs to continue forever!  To this end, they plant 35 trees each week, employ a storm-water retention and reinfiltration system, and recycle more than 75% of their construction waste.

The Daybreak community is doing its best not only to negate its own environmental impact, but to assist the healing process of the environment overall.  It’s a great start to what could really become a new standard in community development.

I am not a bird guy

So he is a bird watcher you say, perhaps an amateur ornithologist, so what, who cares, lots of people have hobbies, and why does one tenant’s hobby on the upper floors of a downtown apartment building make for an interesting character?!?

Well let me tell you why, because this bat shit crazy mofo has somehow I do not know how convinced these wild swallow like things to live in his apartment.  Honestly, how does someone do that?  It can’t be food alone, maybe it has to do with some sort of weird bird man mojo that this guy has going on, or maybe some sort of subsonic sound that emanates from him, going out into the air, a sound that only birds can hear, drawing them to his place, where they fly in and out the very expensive window I installed a few years back whenever they please, leaving behind droppings and feathers and who knows what else all over the place.

You open the door and you see them, on bookshelves or the couch.  They are definitely not used to me because i D E F I I N A T E L Y do not go there often.  When I do need to come by and replace a smoke alarm battery or help with a light bulb (yes I do that, I do not have to  but I do, especially for the old timers) they like to buzz around.  They probably settle down after I leave.  I wonder if they sleep in there, or if they make nests and lay eggs – not questions I mull over too much nor questions I think I am going to ask any time soon, but sometimes I wonder.

I have a rule when I go into a tenant’s apartment, and that rule is sort of like that old prison guard from TV, “I See Nothing”.  How people live, so long as it does not interfere with the quiet enjoyment of their neighbors, is frankly none of my business.  And the swallow things, as fracken bizarre as it is to see them come in and out, they don’t seem to be hurting anyone.  The Bird Man is a bit of a troubled old soul anyways, he has been there coming up on 20 years, not my longest tenured tenant by any stretch of the imagination, and while he gripes about this and that, he pretty much keeps to himself and his birds, some sort of modern day Robert Franklin Stroud, not trapped in Alcatraz per se, but bound up in a personal jail of his own, one he has a key to but keeps going back to each day.

I try not to see anything, but it makes me think sometimes.

I mean if you knew that the bed had an actual bedbug, let alone a freaking colony, once you get done screaming and running around stripping off your PJs, checking every inch of your body several times over, most sane people would bring out the flame thrower and torch their bed lest the nasty little creatures somehow escape and infest the entire room, apartment or house.

While pointing the nozzle of the flamethrower at said bedbug infested mattress may not technically be the greenest option out there, there are solutions that sometimes transcend the need to be ecologically sensitive.  Anyways I am sure you can buy a carbon offset for the burning bed.

So when, for example, I hear from one of my building managers that during a routine, annual smoke alarm/CO monitor swap out the nice tenants down the hall mentioned that they have had bedbugs for a year, and that there solution has been to smash the bugs and wipe their remains on the walls and then go back to sleep, and that the bedbugs were in their old apartment but thought when they moved, bringing of course their old mattresses WITH THEM TO THE NEW (i.e. mine) APARTMENT who would have thoguth that the bedbugs would be there too.

What are the odds?

Its not like this is the only bunch of Einsteins I have had lengthy discourse with regarding this subject.  I bought a building once, and the nice lady and her daughter who lived down a different hall showed me the water bottles that they sprayed on the bedbugs to “make them go away”.  That the bedbugs had been in the apartment for some years might have been a clue that away was not nearly as far as they thought it was, but who am I to point out such fine points?

So while sustainable living is always the preferred option, there are times when you need to break out the no holds barred chemical warfare gear.  Not mustard gas mind you, though it is appealing – your pest guy (if he does not totally suck) will be able to show you the right stuff and should have a cleaning protocol to follow.  But seriously, if you had these things in your home, would you just roll over and go back to sleep?

Garbage can be exciting in that one can save a boatload of money through careful and responsible waste management. In the case of SRELP’s building garbage profile, for example, Helmut was spending $3,878.05 per month to provide garbage services for the 6 buildings he manages. At several building locations, he was providing more garbage space than his tenants required. Available garbage volume is calculated by adding up the volume of available bin space (2 96 gallon bins provide 192 gallons of available bin space) and multiplying that sum by the number of garbage pickup days per week.  2 96 gallon bins picked up 7 times per week=1344 gallons of weekly available bin space.

By traveling to each building location repeatedly over the course of 2 wees and recording the amount of available volume that was being used, I was able to determine that most of our buildings use far less space than we provide.  In other words, we were paying to provide garbage volume that wasn’t being used.  We then worked to come up with a new available garbage volume that would better fit the habits and necessities of our tenants.  Upon finding said number, we called and changed our building garbage profiles for 3 out of the 6 buildings that we manage.  The results were as follows:

Original price for waste management: $3,878.05 per month

New price for waste management: $2,479.37 per month

By reducing our garbage bin reliance and applying a more eco-friendly waste management program, we saved (and will continue to save) $1,398.68 per month.  If saving almost $1,500 per month doesn’t make you excited, then just think that you can save a lot of money AND save the environment by becoming more compost and recycling conscientious.

Signing off,

A very excited SRELP intern

Economically, the introduction of the compost bins allows for a reduction of garbage pickups.  After traveling to Bush street regularly  to check the volume of garbage bin space that was being used with the SRELP group, we came to the conclusion that we could reduce the garbage pickup schedule by 3 days (which saved more than $800 per month).  The compost bin will provide a new space for biodegradable waste, giving us the ability to reduce our reliance on the black bin, which saved us money.  Fortunately, San Francisco’s Recology policies ensure that compostable and recyclable waste management is a free service.  In this way, we can divert what was once garbage volume into composting volume, saving money.

Environmentally, even a 33% increase in compost use is beneficial.  True, it’s less than we would have hoped– but I am certain that through persistent phone calls and communication with our tenants, we can still convince some of the Bush street residents to help us save our planet.

Next stop, compost at Guerrero!

I’ve been researching kitchen cabinets for my sustainable apartment kitchen project here at Sustainable Schmidt, and stumbled upon the main “green” certification for the kitchen cabinet industry: KCMA‘s Environmental Stewardship Program (ESP).  KCMA, the Kitchen Cabinets Manufactures Association, is an industry-based group with over 400 members that began in 1955.  It started it’s ESP certification program in 2006 “to help cabinet manufacturers demonstrate their commitment to environmental sustainability and help consumers easily identify environmentally-friendly products.” Cabinet companies that seek certification have to go through the ESP’s point-based certification process, that involves collaboration with a sustainable forestry program and compliance with the formaldehyde emission level of the California Air Resources Compwood ATCM.

While this stewardship program seems relatively strict, I found it curious that this certification process for the cabinet industry is sponsored by its industry-based organization.  When you consider the fact that KCMA was “founded with the goal of promoting growth for the entire cabinet industry and strengthening individual members,” it’s hard to see how the ESP can objectively evaluate this industry.  One wonders if this “certified green” stamp that manufacturers can label their products with is less informative and more a form of greenwashing.  The ESP does receive a third-party consensus from the American National Standards Institute, which somewhat alleviates my worries.  However, ANSI’s mission statement is to “empower its members and constituents to strengthen the U.S. marketplace position in the global economy,” so economic factors still have a louder voice than environmental ones.

It might be informative to compare the ESP to what many consider to be a truly rigorous and objective third-party

certification system, Cradle to Cradle Certification.  Brainchild of William McDonough, whose book I featured in my last post, Cradle to Cradle Certification “is a multi-attribute eco-label that assesses a product’s safety to humans and the environment and design for future life cycles.” The multi-tiered format of the C2C certification system, from Platinum down to Gold, Silver, and Basic, already demonstrates a big difference in the legitimacy between this and KCMA’s ESP, which lacks any sort of differential standards.  In fact, C2C’s highest Platinum certification is so rigorous that no products have yet achieved this award.  On the other hand, because their is only one standard certification within the ESP, their lacks any incentive for cabinet manufacturers to upgrade their processes above the required minimum, and fails to reward those that take extra steps in their processes to be more sustainable.

Unlike Cradle to Cradle’s required standards for each tier of certification, the ESP certification process follows a point-based system where not all possible points have to be undertaken to receive certification.  Thus, manufacturers can skimp out on accomplishing certain aspects of it’s resource processes or product management completely unchecked without and consequences.  Furthermore, applicants for the ESP only need to “self-certify” that they’ve achieved certain tasks by filling out various forms.  C2C appoints their own project manager to each applicant who is trying to receive certification.  Strange enough, in this article manufacturers have reported little to no added cost for compliance with ESP, which adds to the perception that this certification process might be too light on manufacturers, who barely need to change their processes to comply.

All these points strongly call to question the true sustainability of KCMA’s Environmental Stewardship Program.  Something doesn’t sit right with industry-groups regulating industry-groups.  This voluntary certification’s stamp can be misleading to customer’s who are looking for environmentally friendly products for their homes.  Greenwashing or not, in 2007 KCMA gathered that its manufacturers sold a total of $10 billion in certified products.  The monetary incentive to be “green” is there, and industries are finding ways to take advantage of that fact without having to change their processes and actually strive for environmental stewardship.  Not surprisingly, there are yet to be any Cradle to Cradle Certified kitchen cabinet products, even on the Basic level.

In addition to my internship here with Sustainable Schmidt, I’ve been spending some time interning with San Mateo County government for their Energy Upgrade program.  This statewide incentive program provides rebates for homeowners who want to increase the energy efficiency of their homes.  This program is unique in that it helps you to “upgrade” the comfort and efficiency of  the home as a whole – not just single products like PG&E’s rebates.  Each county in the Bay Area has their respective branches to this program.  Rebate amount goes from $1000-$4000, depending on how much you improve your efficiency by.  My goal by the end of the summer is to convince my dad to retrofit our home with this program.  With any luck, we’ll be able to combine them with other rebates and tax credits.  If you’re looking for a comprehensive list of all the different rebates in your area, check out the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency.

Ever really thought about what that tree in front of your house does for you? The Colorado Tree Coalition has written a comprehensive list of the Benefits of Trees in Urban Areas.  I understood the obvious benefits of urban forests like carbon sequestration and reduced run-off, but had never considered how trees in neighborhoods would strengthen its community, or helps slow traffic.

I’m halfway through Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough & Michael Braungart.  These two authors introduce an interesting concept for product life-cycle that draws inspiration from nature itself.  Rather than creating products that create unusable waste and degrade the natural environment, a product design that encourages integration of its life with the rest its environment.  For example, whereas conventional roofing degrades, overheats, and eventually has to be thrown away, green roofs covered in plants “maintain the roof at a stable temperature, providing free evaporative cooling in hot weather and insulation in cold weather, and shields it from the sun destructive rays, making it last longer.” William McDonough gave a good lecture on TED Talks of this design concept:

With the death of guitar hero and the imminent rise of the next generation of video game consoles, people are going to start having old, plastic guitars and outdated consoles piling up.  Find out how to discard your used toys here.

I like being able to hear news about our government and be able to say, “fail” (with added face palm), this time is no exception.

I did not realize that this was such a big dilemma but, evidently, some parents have a hard time choosing between biodegradable and cloth diapers.  This article is a little old, but that’s okay.

In more recent news, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit by several states which attempted to make utility companies reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

PG&E is trying to guilt trip its customers into saving trees for an additional sixty dollars a year.  Bad PG&E, bad.

Ugly or Not Ugly

For more on this house click here.