It seems like just in the past week the trees of New York have decided to shed most of their leaves. Around EcoBrooklyn, leaves are floating down onto our green roof and some of our projects in the yard. The smell of fallen leaves overpowers the smell of city, and it’s a welcome [...]
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On 10/11/11 Eco Brooklyn, a green builder and supporter of a better America and world, went down to the Financial district to check out Occupy Wall Street. Nearly 30 days ago, a diverse group of citizens took to the street in NYC, and marched down to Zuccotti Park, formerly “Liberty Plaza Park”, placed in [...] Green design is a broad term. In an attempt to narrow it down, we are looking at how green design and “universal design” or lifespan design are linked. First of all, you’re probably wondering what universal design means. Here are the seven principles that define universal design, according to North Carolina State University [...] EcoBrooklyn Director Gennaro Brooks-Church, talks about the importance of salvaged materials which are crucial in helping achieve the company’s goal of zero or negative waste created and zero or negative new materials used. This is one of the main things that separates Eco Brooklyn from an ordinary NY contractor – finding floor joists, wood [...] Eco Brooklyn’s business model is to salvage as much as possible. We believe this is the true definition of a NY green contractor in a city with such abundant and high quality trash. We recently salvaged what we thought was marble. We cut it down to make all the bathroom and kitchen counters for [...] A typical thing happened today in the life of Eco Brooklyn. One of our workers noticed a dumpster full of wood and called it in to the office. I dispatched our “Rescue Truck”, Eco Brooklyn’s veggie oil pickup, to go salvage the wood before it was carted off to the dump. This wood has [...] Here is a cool example of creative salvaging. They have taken planks from an old brownstone roof and flipped them upside down as a ceiling. The one consideration is fire. This was done in a restaurant, which means it shares the ceiling with an apartment upstairs, which means the ceiling has to be [...] I realize concrete has huge embodied energy and creates tonnes of CO2 during it’s manufacture but I still can’t resist reading up on the uses of concrete for residential interior applications. Eco Brooklyn is guilty of making some concrete counters too. I just read Concrete at Home by the concrete fanatic Fu-Tung Chen. He [...] Since we are in the salvage and reuse business for all our building we are always on the look out to get good salvaged stuff in the New York area. Here is a great place: the Habitat ReStores. It’s not exactly in the NY area but it is close. We’ve not had the opportunity [...] One of the most revolutionary things to happen to our company was the discovery of Demo Bags, a contractor garbage bag alternative. It is revolutionary because it is so simple yet so profound. We are a green construction company in Brooklyn. We salvage, reuse, and recycle like obsessed neurotic 1950′s house wives if they [...] We just added another bike to our small fleet of Green Building Transportation. Unlike new construction (yuk!) where you can plan the process better, working in a Brooklyn Brownstone has a lot of surprises. So it is common to need a small thing to keep the job going – a certain size screw, some [...] Here is a great idea for nice wood seating. Of course you could use new wood, but the use of smaller pieces means you have more chances of finding good salvaged wood for the job. We like salvaged wood from old Brooklyn brownstones because the wood is so much nicer and stronger. It is [...] You might have seen the recycled glass tiles in green magazines. You might have also seen the price…..for some reason they remain in the stranglehold of boutique green builders. It is actually pretty easy to make glass tiles out of salvaged glass. You do need a kiln. But thats about it. This page describes [...] Tomorrow (Saturday): A Used-Electronics Community Recycling Event in Park Slope- This July 18, from 9a.m. until 6p.m., join Park Slope in welcoming PerScholas to Brooklyn with a Community Used-Electronics Recycling Event. Operating under the highest standards of excellence, PerScholas, a non-profit organization, will save your electronics from landfills (where their toxins soak into the [...] An LED driver is a self-contained power supply that has outputs matched to the electrical characteristics of your LED or array of LEDs. There are currently no industry standards, so understanding the electrical characteristics of your LED or array is critical in selecting or designing a driver circuit. Drivers should be current-regulated (deliver a [...] As a Brooklyn green contractor we actually generate more garbage than a non-green contractor! More garbage!? You ask. The truth is yes. Bag for bag we cart off more garbage from our sites than non-green job sites. But how could this be?! The reason for this is that we BRING ON a lot more [...] So with the understanding that any experiment should be undertaken with the proper materials. I set out and found a large supply of computers and harvested anything I could use, before they were sent off to be melted down. (Or crushed) After 7 hours of unscrewing, unclipping and moderate finger jabbing I end up [...] I’ve gone a couple weeks without finding cull or used sheet rock. Not wanting to wait any longer I painfully, regretfully, and sadly went to Home Depot and bought new sheet rock. It is rare that I buy new material like that. Now it is a strange feeling. It is so easy. Go [...] I’m happy to say that NY is an exception to the rule that using wood isn’t green due to the Gotham Forest we have here: millions of board feet of old growth lumber sitting in the frames of old buildings just waiting to be harvested and reused. I simply have to drive around to [...] We wanted some siding for a wall we built. So we used some 100 year old joists. We took the joists and cut them into long strips. Then we sealed them on both sides so they don’t warp. Then we put them onto strips that we had attached to the wall. This [...] Dumpsters, Job Sites, Garbage Night Streets, Damaged Store Stock, Craigslist, Neighbours, Salvage stores, Ebay, our building… these are some of the places we get our materials from. The rules are simple: it needs to be dangerously close to being sent to the dump or once used. Here are some of the things we [...] New York recently approved the use of PVC as drain pipes. PVC is considered very “not green”, mostly because it basically takes forever to decompose, so it sits around in landfills for hundreds of years. Or it gets burned and lets off all sorts of nasty chemicals. From a practical point it is also [...] This is more a technical point but something worth considering when using materials. For example the “problem” with recycled cellulose is that it is degraded. There is a green term for this but I forgot it. Basically you are taking a higher purpose material – newspaper that is used to transport knowledge – and [...] We needed some slate to repair an existing slate wall on the top of the green show house. One consideration was using a slate look alike that is made from recycled materials. But then I discovered there is a thriving community of people who salvage old slate from homes. They have merged [...] The process of building green is different than normal building. There are new considerations to include in the mix. Here is an example. Solar PV is a smart choice in NY I think. NY gets a lot of sun and although a Californian electrician might scoff at it, most NY professionals think it is [...] Green building is not mainstream. The systems and habits are not in place. Doing a green job is part construction part education part experimentation because once you start thinking off the grid there are very few reference points to guide you. I had a plumber walk out of my job today before even giving [...] Above: Facade with planter and recycled joists. Originally the top facade of the building had a lot of rotted wood. And there was a great view. So in the heat of the summer I tore down the wall and planned on adding a wall of glass. It would have been magnificent. But [...] Only in USA are dumpsters so full of wonderful stuff. And you can’t get fancier than a Corcoran dumpster. There is one in front of the Corcoran condos on President St in Carroll Gardens. I had the good luck to check them out today and found 1000 sq.ft. of once used wide plank [...] Above Pic: “ugly” wood that I use for everything from studs to window frames. Recycling is a great way to reuse materials and save money. It is important to keep in mind the extra costs of recycling. If you get the materials for free, say from a salvage, that is a great starting [...] After some research we noticed that one of the most effective ways to reduce impact noise between floors was to put a recycled tyre product between the floor and sub floor. It creates a vibrating cushion that absorbs the impact, thus deadening the sound. The only problem is that this product is costly. And [...] |
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