Greenbuild Special Edition: What We Brought Home From New York

📬 INTRO: IF YOU CAN MAKE IT HERE

Greenbuild came to New York for the first time. Urban Green Council’s Chris Halfnight summed up the city at the awards.

“It’s not easy here,” he said. “But green building keeps making it.”

Here’s the best of what we saw all week!

🌍 FIELD NOTES: BEST OF THE SHOW

🎭 The Apollo Gets Quiet

Monday’s hard-hat tour of the Apollo Theater’s $65 million renovation was my favorite Greenbuild tour ever. The challenge of meeting both historic preservation and LEED expectations required so many innovative takes on design and construction. For example, today’s music carries far more bass than it did in 1955, so Charcoalblue’s Bruno Cardenas developed incredible new panels that vibrate and absorb only the low end. Bigger ducts and diffusers slow the air so the room can go silent.

Crews found historic murals behind the old wall panels, so the new acoustic panels had to mount without penetrating them in addition to meeting LEED specifications. While we couldn’t take photos before the big reveal, watch the news to see this landmark of America’s music history re-open.

Since March 30, a New York City landmark needs a historic building report to claim an energy code exemption.

🛠️ Back-Corner Booths

Copper showed a battery-equipped induction range that plugs into a standard 120V outlet, so no panel upgrade and the power to cook during outages. Brilliant. The New York City Housing Authority picked it for a 100-apartment pilot that can scale to 10,000.

Sensible has invented a window heat pump for multifamily markets that weighs under 50 pounds and goes in with one person in under five minutes. “We’re planning to make them in Vermont, not China,” its co-founder told me.

Solatube re-released its OptiView Fresnel diffuser and turned tubes sideways to light whole walls. Wasted*, “the urine mining company,” turns porta-potty urine into fertilizer. Its screen read, “Thanks for the deposit. We’ll take it from here.”

Best tagline of the show goes to the “urine miners”.

♻️ Zero Waste Gets a Rewrite

USGBC launched TRUE v2, with a 90% diversion threshold, 100 points and optional pre-certification.

LEED’s original author, Rob Watson, now runs SWEEP, a standard for city waste systems. Keep an eye on SWEEP as it begins to unveil some incredible innovations in recycling this coming year.

USGBC pegs TRUE’s annual financial benefit at $40,000-plus from lower waste costs and commodity sales.

🏆 Awards Night in an 1891 Warehouse

The USGBC Leadership Awards filled The Mallory inside Terminal Warehouse, where COOKFOX kept the original heavy timbers.

Grace Farms took the Malcolm Lewis Impact! Award. Its 55 geothermal wells cover about 80% of its heating and cooling.

Leadership Award honoree John Mandyck: “If you do it right and you do it well, you can get a competitive advantage.”

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🏛 BUILT TO LAST:

Copper’s range skips the electrician. Sensible’s heat pump skips the install crew. Fewer trades on site makes a retrofit a much easier ‘yes’.

By role:

📐 Designers: Budget for a historic building report before promising a landmark client an exemption.

🔨 Builders: Ask your hauler for diversion by load, then roll it into the monthly totals LEED v5 reviewers want.

🏢 Operators: Price 120V induction and window heat pumps where a panel upgrade kills the budget.

🌱 Emerging pros: Walk the expo’s back corners, where the founders stand.

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