
This is part of a series of video blog posts about green architecture and construction leading up to Greenbuild, the U.S. Green Building Council's annual conference. Solar panels make DC power—the kind that comes out of batteries and flows in one direction. That gets fed into a machine called a solar inverter and it flows around a big copper coil and it creates an alternate current.

This is the first in a series of video blog posts about green architecture and construction leading up to Greenbuild, the U.S. Green Building Council's annual conference. Planet Green is a Silver sponsor of this year's event, which will be held in Boston November 19-21.

The essence of green building is team and assembling very early an integrated and proactive team. And we have been very lucky to assemble a great team of green craftsmen.

his is our beautiful neighborhood, called Rockridge, in Oakland, Calif. It's a half-mile down from Berkeley and UC Berkeley. One of the green elements that attracted us here in Rockridge is that it's flat, and incredibly walkable, and one-half a block away are all the support services that you need.

This is part of a series of video blog posts about green architecture and construction leading up to Greenbuild, the U.S. Green Building Council's annual conference. This post was written by Sara Gottfried, David's wife.

Welcome to my new office—the Gottfried Lifepod. This was a joint venture between Envision Solar and my team. We greatly improved the base steel structure with eight solar panels on the roof and figured out how to make it into a super comfortable home office.

When you remodel an old home, and certainly a 1915 craftsman, and you embrace green and you want LEED Platinum like us, there's a lot of decisions to be made. What do you save? Do you keep the old beautiful wood? I would say absolutely. But you have issues of insulation, so you have to figure out how you blow it in while you keep the old wood and also how to install new windows.

For the framing, we used FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) wood throughout the house, and it's marked as such so we know it comes from forests that use highly sustainable practices. We also used FSC plywood in the attic for storage areas up above.

I'm sitting on our future dual-flush toilet by Caroma, one of the most water efficient models on the market. Overall, they average less than one gallon per flush. In green building it's extremely important that we start with envelope of structure and make it as tight as possible.

Welcome to our new green kitchen. It doesn't look it yet, but we're going to have a lot of great new energy-efficient appliances and all sorts of green features.

I'm sitting on our future dual-flush toilet by Caroma, one of the most water efficient models on the market. Overall, they average less than one gallon per flush. In green building it's extremely important that we start with envelope of structure and make it as tight as possible.

This is part of a series of video blog posts about green architecture and construction leading up to Greenbuild, the U.S. Green Building Council's annual conference. Here's our first tree, a vine maple, and it's very representative of the type of landscaping we'll do in our back yard - local, low-water and planned by us.

Our Kohler tub is green in several ways: It has high recycled-content steel (about 97 percent because it's cast iron) but it's also not green because tubs use a lot of water—a lot more than a four-minute shower that I would prefer everyone in the family do, but I've had a hard time getting my daughters and my wife to agree to that.

So here we are sitting in my new regenerative office, and one of the things I hope to do here is write the sequel to my book, Greed to Green. This is a memoir of the founding of the U.S. Green Building Council and it's a 20-year story of a segment of my life, spanning from a young and eager real estate developer in the go-go 1980s to founding and growing the U.S. and World Green Building Councils.


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