Walter Yu, P.E., LEED AP

Drinking water that's not suited to drink!

The Toxic Waters article series by the New York Times focuses on the worsening impact of pollutant on the nation’s drinking water.

Its most recent article focuses on outdated laws from the Safe Drinking Water Act that regulates 91 of the 60,000 chemicals documented by the EPA as potential pollutants in drinking water.

Many pollutants are carcinogens even in small quantities (in the parts per million magnitude) due to more potent compounds being created by evolving industry processes.

Some chemicals have been found to be harmful to health at smaller quantities than previously thought while others have not been added or updated onthe list of regulated pollutants.

The main issue is that tighter regulations have met resistance from industry lobbying while many continue to consume water from local water districts that may contain polluted water sources.

Complicating the issue is that many health effects such as cancer or birth defects do not appear for years due to the small dosages involved. Testingg drinking water for pollutants from outdated regulations still allows harmful dosages to pass into drinking water.

This holds true in other cases such as air pollution or lead in drinking water: consumption of small doses takes years for effects to appear. Proving the adverse health effects from consuming polluted drinking water is difficult to do, which has made tighter regulations more difficult to pass.

Testing itself is a challenge given that there are approximately 57,400 water systems delivering varying qualities of water. Many water districts still follow the outdated regulations, which may contain either lawful yet harmful chemicals or dosages that are now found to be harmful.

From an environmental engineering perspective, drinking quality has meant developing new technologies to better filtrate water for pollutants and helping water districts implement them. From a sustainability perspective, poor drinking quality not only affects health but reflects the worsening state of our waterways, which have experienced increased pollution.

On an individual level, we can use activated carbon filters (or similar devices) to protect ourselves against possible pollutants as recommended in the book Green, Greener, Greenest by Lori Bongiorno. As with many “green” issues involving health and the environment, we can often chart our own course to affect our own lives.

Open for business despite hard economic times!

The world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalafi, recently opened in the Gulf emirate of Dubai, standing standing almost a half-mile tall (2716 ft). It beats the current record holder, Taipei 101 in Taiwan, by over a 1000 ft (previous record for Taipai 101 was 1666 ft).

Originally named the Burj Dubai, the building was renamed for the leader of  its emirate neighbor, Abu Dhabi, which loaned Dubai $10 billion to complete construction.

The project began construction in 2004 and completed November of last year. It boasts 160 stories and almost 5 million square feet of office and residential space.

Although the building interior was still being completed, the project was opened 1325 work days after start of excavation (ground breaking, essentially) work.

The building was designed by the American architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which also designed the Sears Tower in Chicago and 1 World Trade Center tower in New York City.

Building a tower to an unprecedented height required special design considerations by the structural engineers. Specifically, the building faces high winds due to height and possible earthquakes from a nearby fault.

Other than design challenges, the project faced financial ones as well. The project began construction during good financial times but faced declining property values and shortage of buyers and leasers for its residential units and commercial space, respectively.

At its peak, the 1044 luxury condominium units were selling for approximately $2700 per square foot, which has dropped significantly during boom times. The same holds true for commercial space, where rental rates have plummeted.

The tower is big win for Dubai, which gained notoriety during the oil price spike in the past several years. Dubai and other emirates are major exporters of oil, which has paid for projects such as the Burj Khalafi.

In addition, the project is a win for civil engineering, which continues to innovate with new designs that allow buildings to climb higher and bridges to span longer.

Finally, other highlights include:

• A 900-ft fountain at the foot of the tower, the largest operating fountain in the world
• 57 elevator lifts to eliminate the need for elevators with much longer runs
• Main service lift has rise of over 1500 ft
• Tower is part of 500-acre development
• Tower occupancy to be approximately 12,000 people.

Building green is more than skin deep.

In my post on styrofoam building blocks, I made a reference to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or otherwise known as “cradle-to-grave” analysis.

So this recent GreenSource article caught my attention, which discusses  the benefits of LCA and suggests that it be considered in the LEED rating system.

According to the author, the LEED rating system has brought green building to the mainstream, and LCA would bring even more transparency to the LEED rating process.

The main benefit of LCA is its rigorous approach in considering over-looked phases such as building operation and material manufacturing that contribute to environmental impact.

The USGBC (which administers the LEED-rating program) is currently using LCA to inform its project rating system without direct implementation, which is a step in the right direction.

Bringing more transparency and clarity to the rating process would improve information symmetry, a term used by economists to describe the state where both buyers and sellers in a marketplace have equal information about their product.

Information symmetry would be useful between vendors and suppliers, where both parties are aware of product impact and the monetary costs of those impacts.

However, LCA still has a way to go before being a widely-accept form of impact analysis. The assumptions of factors to include and how they are calculated depend on who is performing the analysis. In addition, the most widely-used analysis software, Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings, is still basic in nature and only considers major building materials. As a result, LCA currently suffers from lack of conformity and product data.

In conclusion, LCA is still far from being implemented in LEED-ratings. But as the products considered by LCA grows, it may bring LCA more attention and likelihood of use in the LEED-rating system.