This Old House: Minus the Toxins
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Realtor Amy Levin bought a historic three-story house last year in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Washington D.C., gutted it and rebuilt it.
But this isn't a standard renovation.
The realtor with LevinAllStars is seeking LEED Platinum certification for her home from the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED is the most widely used set ofstandards for green building, and platinum is the highest designation. If she gets it, she'll be in the minority: There have been less than a handful of LEED platinum rehabs across the country.
On a tour of her home, Levin gave NPR's Robert Siegel a rundown on all of the special materials she used to "green" her home.
She bought a front-loading washer and dryer to cut down on water and energy use, and a double-flush toilet to reduce water usage. She bought recycled and recyclable materials that conserve energy. And she coated her walls with non-toxic paint that have low- or no- volatile organic compounds.
"When you make a home a lot more energy efficient it means you're keeping a lot of the same air inside the house," says Peter Yost of Brattleboro, Vt.-based Building Green. "So it's even more important that you not dump a bunch of chemicals into it. No-VOC or low-VOC means that as the material dries or cures, it's giving off a lot less complicated organic molecules into the air."
(Heidi Glenn, NPR)
Yost, an expert on green building materials, came along on the tour to give his expert analysis of Levin's unique rehab. His company publishes Environment Building News and Green Spec, a guide to residential building materials for people who are concerned about the environmental impact of their homes.
The Tour
Levin's house has a modern but rustic look — exposed brick; open tread stairways to the second and third floors; blonde wood cabinets; and stainless steel fixtures in the kitchen. The shelves and moldings are often rough-hewn. And a lot of what she used is recycled, including the heart pine wood flooring, which is reclaimed from the original structure.
(Heidi Glenn, NPR)
She used feld wood for the baseboards and window sills. The breakfast bar was made out of Mulberry. The cabinet in the kitchen was made out of wheatboard, an agro by-product.
Buying these cabinets is "something that you can do that's green that can be less expensive than going to order," Levin says. "Cabinets are not often part of a green process at all, from finishes to materials and all that other stuff."
Also in the kitchen, Levin bought concrete countertops that are a mixture of Portland cement, the most common type of cement, as much fly ash, an ingredient in cement Yost calls "environmentally damaging."
(Heidi Glenn, NPR)
Fly ash is "very energy intensive to create and the fuels they use to calcine [heat] the material are among the dirtiest fuels that we use," Yost says. "So whenever you can replace fly ash, which is the combustion by-product of coal combustion, you're taking a waste material and it actually improves the performance of the concrete."
Behind the walls, Levin installed biobased spray foam insulation to conserve energy.
"I got my bill from the other house that I moved out of and my bills here are about half of what they were all winter," Levin says. "The focus on the payback is one of those things that I think we really have to be selling people, social consciousness is super important, but from a dollars perspective it's starting to become easier to show people that green pays."
(Heidi Glenn, NPR)
The porch's floor and railing is made of a plastic wood fiber composite material.
"It sort of takes the best attributes of two very different materials," Yost says. "Plastics tend to contract and expand a lot. Wood rots. If you mix them together you get a lot less contraction and expansion and you get a more durable material in the wood. Both are generally reclaimed materials that go in the manufacturing process."
On the roof, Amy has a rack of evacuated tubes for her hot water heater an efficient way to catch solar energy. There is also a tankless, gas-heated backup. Adding in these costly elements, this is a $500,000 rehab project.
(Heidi Glenn, NPR)
Of all of these green virtues, the greenest is durability, according to Yost. His advice? Install something that lasts a lifetime and consumes less energy rather than something that's more efficient in the short run, but has to be replaced several times.
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MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Now, on this 39th Earth Day, an example of green building, specifically, a house in a Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was built in the late 19th century and now it has been rehabbed with the 21st century eye on the environment.
Ms. AMY LEVIN (Real Estate Agent; Resident, Washington, D.C.): Hi, I'm Amy Levin.
SIEGEL: Levin is a real estate agent. She bought this three-story house and then she had it gutted and rebuilt.
Mr. PETER YOST (Residential Program Manager, Building Green, Brattleboro, Vermont): Hi, I'm Peter Yost. I'm with Building Green from Brattleboro, Vermont.
SIEGEL: Building Green publishes Environmental Building News and Green Spec, a guide to residential building materials for people who are concerned about the environmental impact of their homes. Peter Yost flew in from Vermont to see Amy Levin's very rare project, an urban residential gut rehab that's built to meet the LEED platinum standard. LEED is spelled L-E-E-D. And since LEED is a program of the USGBC, we start with a serving of green alphabet soup.
Mr. YOST: L-E-E-D stands for leadership in energy and environmental design.
Ms. LEVIN: USGBC, the U.S. Green Building Council, VOC.
Mr. YOST: It's a good one.
Ms. LEVAN: Volatile organic compound.
SIEGEL: That's what we don't want.
Mr. YOST: When you make a home a lot more energy efficient, it means you're keeping a lot of the same air inside the house. So, it's even more important that you not dump a bunch of chemicals into it. Low-VOC or no-VOC means that as the material dries or cures, it's giving off a lot less complicated organic molecules into the air.
SIEGEL: Okay, let's go inside.
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah.
SIEGEL: Amy Levin's green house has a decidedly modern but rustic look inside: exposed brick, open tread stairways to the second and third floors, blonde wood cabinets and stainless-steel fixtures in the kitchen. The shelves and moldings are often rough-hewn. And a lot of what she used is recycled, including some of the wood.
Ms. LEVIN: So, I got some, starting in the front here. You know, basically, all the flooring is reclaimed, you know, from the original structure. Some of it was moved around and then, and that's - it's heart pine, so…
Mr. YOST: So in sort of the hierarchy of things, you've got reused, first of all.
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah.
MR. YOST: And then, salvaged second.
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah, lots of reuse, lots of salvage, and I'll show you, kind of when we walk through, sort of little places where we did that. But you know, I mean, building envelope being the biggest thing, the windows are pretty high up on the scale of the - you have various new factors and other things to keep the efficiency levels going. And then, behind the walls there are bio-based (unintelligible) insulation…
Mr. YOST: A lot of materials are being sort of hidden behind the wall, but you're going to have utility bills that bring that right back from in the forefont from behind those walls.
Ms. LEVIN: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I got my bill from the other house that I moved out of. My bills here are about half of what they were all winter. You know, I think the focus on the payback is - one of those things I think we really have to be selling people. I mean, social consciousness is super important. But, you know, from a dollars perspective, it's starting to become easier to show people that green pays.
Mr. YOST: There's a bunch of programs for new homes that actually provide energy bill guarantees.
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah.
Mr. YOST: And I've never heard of it being available on a retrofit. But the concept is pretty powerful because if you can tell people, well, you know, we'll guarantee what your bill's going to be because we have such confidence in the way the house performs. So, there's a lot of ways to translate, you know, the hard work that's behind the walls into stuff that really catches people's attention.
SIEGEL: You talked to us about the envelope…
Ms. LEVIN: Uh-huh.
SIEGEL: …that the roof, the walls, the floor, now more into the interior. Let's…
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.
SIEGEL: …Let's move inside. I want you to point out some things to us.
Ms. LEVAN: Okay, so all the trim here, all the window sills, all the trim, and then, also the breakfast bar is from the same guy who got me those locus trees out front. And his name is Marcus Sims(ph), and he has a company called Treencarnation(ph), and he takes all felled trees from Montgomery County in Maryland and makes furniture, and dimensional lumber and things like that. I thought that was pretty cool, it's a local product. So as far as other materials in here like the drywall, it's all high-percent recycled content, all the paints are either no or low-VOC. And I tried to, you know, sort of mix and match just being a trial house of, you know, using different types of paints and such. So, in here…
SIEGEL: Here we are in the kitchen.
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah.
SIEGEL: And the…
Ms. LEVIN: The breakfast bar here is made out of mulberry, it's again, another felled tree from Montgomery County.
Mr. YOST: I've never seen a piece of decorative mulberry and this is amazing. It's a really beautiful piece of wood.
Ms. LEVIN: He does amazing work, I think - so. The cabinets, this and the roof, I think I was most excited about as far as something that you can do that's green, that can be less expensive than going to order. And it's something that cabinets are not often part of a green process at all, from finishes to materials and all that other stuff. Actually, if want to open that door right there, you can kind of stick your nose in there and take a whiff and you can smell the wheatboard, so there is wheatboard there, that's what the boxes are made out of and that's an agro-bio product. And then, the veneer part and the doors and the sides are all made out of purebond(ph), which is a Columbia Forest Products.
SIEGEL: So this a compositive (unintelligible).
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah, it's like a plywood almost.
Mr. YOST: But the veneer looks like maple.
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah.
Mr. YOST: Yeah.
SIEGEL: And the countertops in the kitchen, what did you go for here?
Ms. LEVIN: So, this is concrete, looked at a couple different options but I just like concrete, I like how it looks. There's a company here locally, a guy named Steve Iler(ph). His company is called Icon and he tries to start using now, like locally recycled aggregate product, too. So I guess there's a dam here nearby where they're taking a bunch of stuff off the back of it and people are trying to crush it up and reuse it into other concrete stuff, so.
Mr. YOST: Has he experimented at all with fly ash content in his concrete?
Ms. LEVIN: Oh, yeah, absolutely. He does offset as much portland cement as possible. I think it's, you know, you can go up to 50 percent now, I guess.
SIEGGEL: What's fly ash content?
Mr. YOST: The most environmentally damaging ingredient in concrete is portland cement, and it's about a third of its content. It is very, very energy intensive to create and the fuels they use to calsign(ph) the material are among the dirtiest fuels that we use. So whenever you can replaced fly ash, which is the combustion byproduct of coal combustion, you've taken away some material, and it actually improves the performance of the concrete.
SIEGEL: Uh-hmm.
Ms. LEVIN: It's really cool because it makes it a little bit darker, a little grayer, kind of gives it a little funkier look when you finish it.
SIEGEL: Let's go upstairs. We walked up to the roof where Amy has a rack of evacuated tubes for her hot water heater. She and Peter Yost say this is an efficient form of solar energy collection. There's also a tankless, gas-heated back-up. This is a $500,000 rehab project, and it is green in a variety of ways. Green means solar energy; it means front-loading washer and dryer to cut down on water and energy use; it means double-flush toilets, less water for liquid waste than for solids. It also means using materials that are non-toxic, recycled and recyclable, materials that conserve energy when they're produced and when they're in service. And Peter Yost says of all these green virtues, the greenest is durability. Install something that lasts a lifetime. That consumes less energy than something that's more efficient in the short run but has to be replaced several times.
We're on the porch, I mean, what is the flooring and the railing, what's it all made of?
Ms. LEVIN: Yeah, so this is just Trex.
Mr. YOST: It's a plastic-wood fiber composite material, and it sort of takes the best attributes of two very different materials. Plastics tend to contract and expand a lot, wood rots. Well, if you mix them together, you get a lot less contraction and expansion and you get a more durable material than the wood. So, and both are generally reclaimed materials that go in the manufacturing process.
SIEGEL: I mean, one sign of what green is now nowadays is, green means easy on energy, durable, efficient - not necessarily natural. I mean, we're talking about lots of synthetic materials that go into making a very green home. I mean, do you think 20 - on the first Earth Day, I suspect that it would have shocked people that the green house of the 21st century would have so much synthetics in it, but that's very much a part of what we're talking about here.
Mr. YOST: I think there's a real good connection between the name ALL THINGS CONSIDERED and green building. Because ALL THINGS CONSIDERED is about looking at things from a whole bunch of different angles, and that's exactly what you do with green building. There are some natural materials that are very appropriate for use in 21st century houses. But there's a lot neat stuff that we've made, particularly that as it relates to energy efficiency, that does a better job than Mother Nature does. So, that's the key to - when you design, when you specify materials and when you actually build a home, it's all things considered. It's taking a look at things from a bunch of different angles and then optimizing what you come up for a solution.
SIEGEL: That's Peter Yost of Building Green and Amy Levin of Washington, D.C. You can see her house and find more on the materials that she used at our Web site, npr.org. And as Peter Yost would say, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
