Here goes….

2010 was a turning point for Eco Brooklyn: we became too successful for our size. Up until last year our love for [...]]]>

The year has ended and a new one has begun. I have prepared a state of the union statement for where Eco Brooklyn has been and where it is going.

Here goes….

2010 was a turning point for Eco Brooklyn: we became too successful for our size. Up until last year our love for green building and eagerness to turn Brooklyn green meant we took on every green job that came our way. But in 2010 we actually took on more work than we could handle. At one point we had six full brownstone renovations going at once plus a host of green roof installations and other green building jobs.

During the year did green roofs, gray water systems, custom green kitchens, salvaged floors, eco gardening and countless other cutting edge green building. Our clients were great and never did we have to compromise. We maintained our policy of never buying new wood and we got closer and closer to our Zero Brownstone goal.

But we were so busy that it stopped being fun and started to feel like work.

The main problem was logistics. Eco Brooklyn is founded on pure idealism – we are dreamers who believe in making the world a better place. We follow the triple bottom line business model where every interaction is beneficial for everyone including employees, clients, neighbors and most of all Mother Earth.

This energy is great and it is contagious. It is why clients come to us.

But we weren’t focused enough on the day to day details, which resulted in wasted money and stressful projects. We weren’t as pragmatic as we should be, which meant unrealistic goals and missed timelines. We didn’t focus on the bottom line enough, resulting in under bidding or going over budget.

Up until 2010 this wasn’t a big problem. Our energy and enthusiasm made up for any lost efficiency and money. What we lacked in logistics we made up for in good will and creativity.

But by 2010 we had gotten much bigger than previous years and it became clear we needed to make some changes fast. Our biggest challenge was coordinating all the jobs so they ran smoothly and on budget. This is a challenge for any company but when you are redefining green building as you go it is even more challenging. Our work is cutting edge and we often have no past reference for how to price it or organize it.

How do you bid on an earthen floor when you have never done one? How do you meet the deadline when the workers are more interested in making the job ecological and beautiful rather than making money?  How do you make sure the dumpster bill is paid if you are more interested in paying for the salvaged flooring?

All this came to a head this year and the jobs became too big, too many and too complex for us to run on fervent idealism alone. We realized what every ethics driven company eventually has to face: no matter how great your cause if you can’t compete in the marketplace you will eventually burn out from lack of energy and money. You will end up bitter and an example that life is no place for dreaming.

Luckily we weren’t too late in our realization. After a couple jobs with late timelines and hurting budgets we saw that we had to become a lot more efficient and pragmatic in order to continue on our own terms. We didn’t become less idealistic or dreamy; in fact we expanded on those values. We added to our focus the idea that we could be competitive and profitable while keeping our values.

We realized that in order to change the current world to a better world we had to be the best of both worlds.

We stepped up our efficiency and our attention to detail. We focused more on profit, not because we particularly care about money itself, but because we understand that money is largely today’s currency of freedom and power. We reduced the jobs we took on to focus on improving the profit and efficiency of our current jobs. We became a very competitive building company as well as the best green builder.

Going into the New Year we are ready. We have found a good balance between visionary dreamers and effective entrepreneurs.

The biggest step in this process was seeing that in order to change the system we can’t criticize it from the outside but rather we have to offer a better system from the inside. The world is inherently pragmatic, sometimes brutally pragmatic, and if you offer a better system it will be embraced.

So instead of getting angry at the world for caring more about profit and efficiency than the planet’s health we ramped up our business so as to be profitable, efficient, AND good for the planet. Eco Brooklyn is now an example of how to be profitable in the current definition of the term while also being a benefit to Mother Earth.

We learned the hard way, and we suffered loss and angry clients, but it has been resolved and we are looking at 2011 with a clean slate, newly hardened to the realism of capitalism but still blossoming in our idealism and passion to turn Brooklyn green.

And we enter 2011 with a more streamlined and effective company, better prepared to be a powerful force in regreening the world.

Going forward we are being more cautious in the jobs we take on. We have reached a comfortable size and want to stay at this size until we master the logistics of a medium to large company. We feel that at this size we can make a steady impact in turning Brooklyn green without stretching our limits.

We will focus on jobs that take green building further instead of branching out trying to make every job green. We will be very vigilant with our finances and stay profitable so that we never have financial constraints keeping us from being as green as we possibly can.

We have a few jobs in the pipeline for this winter onwards, among them a Passive House Harlem brownstone, a Manhattan Earthship, a Brooklyn living wall, a solar install, and some deep energy retrofits. This spring we launch our green garden design and landscaping arm of the business. Last month we incorporated a not for profit to expand on our salvage resale activities and student training program. The Eco Brooklyn green show house is nearing its completion.

Through these jobs and others we hope to continue growing in our own green building knowledge so that we are even more powerful and effective custodians of a green Brooklyn and a green planet earth.

We as a planet are at a crucial ecological point where we have lost so much and have so little left, and yet because of this there is a passion and awareness that propels so many of us to do good and green things in our lives. We must do more and we must do it now. Turning Brooklyn green is our responsibility because acting locally is the only way we can be good global citizens. If every community and business did this for their own geographical area we would be far ahead in our path to global ecological regrowth.

In closing I would like to thank all Eco Brooklyn’s workers and clients who make Eco Brooklyn and its goals real. Eco Brooklyn is defined by its name as both an ecological company and a company deeply rooted in the community and culture of Brooklyn. The community of New York and Brooklyn is what makes the company so special.

Thank you and I wish you a focused and prosperous green year. Happy 2011!

Gennaro Brooks-Church

Owner, Eco Brooklyn.

This was brought to my attention when a local lumber supply sent me the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for wood . At first I thought, ” Why do you [...]]]>

When most people think of wood they don’t think cancer, but studies have shown that wood workers have a higher level of respiratory cancer.

This was brought to my attention when a local lumber supply sent me the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for wood . At first I thought, ” Why do you need MSDS for wood? Wood is perfectly safe.” However the sheet points out that:

Cases of pulmonary fibrosis have been reported in individuals with long term exposure to wood dust. Nasal carcinomas, especially adenocarcinoma, have been documented in workers in the furniture and cabinet-making industries. This excess risk occurs mainly in those exposed to wood dust.

An increase in Hodgkin’s disease has been seen in other industries that are involved in woodworking, especially sawmills. Wood dusts appear to produce a mucostatic effect on the body. A study has suggested that this mucostatic action may be of importance in the development of nasal adenocarcinomas in furniture workers because of the prolonged retention of wood dust in the nasal cavity.

Wood dust is an irritant, although perfectly harmless for most people. However if you irritate the body consistently for long enough then eventually the body will react negatively.

The message here is not that wood is bad, but that any prolonged exposure to an irritant is bad.

This is a key point in green building and the foundation for our strict policing of what substances are allowed in a green home. As green builders we don’t just rely on MSDS to determine if something is toxic. Obviously if the MSDS says it is toxic then it is.

But as this wood safety sheet shows it is often how the material is used that determines the safety of it. And this is what distinguishes green builders from “normal” builders. A green builder has a stricter benchmark for health. And a broader benchmark. The material is looked at from various angles, uses and environments.

A green builder does not just consider the average healthy person when building. They consider how materials will effect pets, old people, sick people, children and even plants.

And they do not just consider the average living environment. What happens if the material gets wet, or if it is scrapped, or in 40 years, or if it is exposed to sun, or to fire? Or a combination of the above?

Is the material toxic when installed and then “it is fine” once it dries?

For example PVC and epoxy are both used commonly in construction and considered safe. The glue used to bind PVC is carcinogenic and so is uncured epoxy. But after installation PVC glue dries and once epoxy cures it becomes inert, thus they are considered safe for the inhabitants.

A green builder isn’t so sure. First of all, have all the carcinogenic fumes REALLY evaporated? And what happens if a child chews on it? Or what happens if the material is subjected to heat?

But most importantly, what about the worker who installs it?

Green building is a holistic process that looks at the entire cycle of building. There is no such thing as a green building if it was built in non-green ways.

Or is the material “fine” when installed and then gets toxic over time, in which case  we’ll deal with it then? This happens a lot.

There are countless sealants, sprays, varnishes, paints and surface protectors in “normal” buildings. They are on almost every surface you touch. They are considered harmless unless ingested and they are too tough to remove for ingestion anyway.

But what happens to that chemical filled floor sealer on the entranceway floor after two thousand footsteps? It begins to wear. And where do those microscopic worn particles go? On your skin, in your lungs, in your eyes…

And what happens when you mix the hundreds of different materials together from all the slowly worn surfaces in your home and throw then into the air as microscopic particles?

You get a chemical soup that slowly wears away at your body like sawdust to a wood worker’s lungs. Mix in a little stress with some genetic predisposition and you’ve got yourself a great recipe for cancer.

Billions of dollars are spent on cancer research without any success. What are these people, idiots? All you have to do is open a normal person’s fridge and see their food surrounded by plastic, sealant, rubber, spray gloss, painted packaging and chemical paper. Check out where they sleep. They are probably surrounded by EMF radiation, fire suppression chemicals in their pillows, anti wrinkle synthetic in their sheets and formaldehyde glue in their mattress.  And we haven’t even gotten to the deathbox of chemicals in their shampoo and conditioner!

But the main point here is that even something as harmless as wood can kill you with cancer. Hell, you could die of chocolate poisoning if you spent a career inhaling chocolate dust.

The point is that we need to become more aware of life. Every religion and philosophy preaches it, every great thinker and visionary said it. Awareness is the key. If you are not aware you will let the saw dust kill you.

There is a great fact that if you put a frog in cold water on the stove then turn the heat on the frog will let itself boil to death. The frog is not able to compute the incremental changes. Obviously it has a lapse of awareness in this area.

With all my respect for frogs I think we can do better. The fact that people are dying from wood dust is simply a microscopic reflection of what we are doing on a global scale as a society. Again, with full respect for wood workers, letting yourself die from wood dust is simply a lack of awareness. Letting ourselves destroy the world like we are is also a lack of awareness.

I don’t think we ever had this awareness consistently. Looking at primitive societies most of them moved camp when the smell from their own garbage got unbearable. Sure they understood their natural surroundings out of survival but they were far from environmentalists.

That solution of moving camp is not an option to us on a global scale. What worked for us before no longer works.  We need to evolve in our awareness. Or we will be boiled alive.

I’d like to think we are resourceful enough to evolve, even if it is out of knee jerk survival instinct. But history shows us that human societies and animals alike don’t always survive.

I for one am rethinking this pot of water I’m sitting in. We all have our own way and for me green building is my ticket out of this increasingly hot pot of water. As a green contractor in Brooklyn I’m swimming as fast as I can to get out of that pot and find the gas knob!

Green roofs, gray water, zero chemicals, salvaged wood, you name it we’re trying it.

Oh, and we wear dust masks when cutting the salvaged wood.

It is such simple yet [...]]]>

I love the way people are so inspired by green. The great thing about it is that it can pretty much be applied to anything in your life and make it better. For example as a green contractor in Brooklyn I’m putting a green perspective on Brownstone renovations.

It is such simple yet powerful formlua: find your passion, apply green.

I can’t think of anything where applying a green perspective would actually be harmful….can you?

Like this personal blog’s name “Going Green is Divine” where green has been elevated to a personal joyful decadence (but the good kind). Putting a green perspective on your life’s passion is really the way to go.

For our kitchens for example we were going to buy salvaged kitchens, make them in house out of salvaged wood [...]]]>

Our budget for the Brooklyn green show house got decimated with this banking crisis. So we don’t really have a budget any more. It is basically as cheap as we can make it.

For our kitchens for example we were going to buy salvaged kitchens, make them in house out of salvaged wood or find a company we wanted to represent and could afford. There is a lot of good wood and second hand kitchens here. The closets were going to be studs and sheet rock with basic doors and drawers. The visual parts were going to be salvaged wood.

Our financing problem is not unique so we are using it to take advantage of the new attitude by showing affordable quality green products. That is what I think will sell now and for a good while into the future.

The outlook has changed drastically here in the epicenter of the financial crisis, AKA New York. It is considered very intelligent to buy affordable green products. “High End” is considered stupid and associated with Wall Street spending. The underlying change is that expensive is no longer necessarily tied with quality. Quality is tied to quality regardless of price.

And with the new green perspective more often it is greener to buy something affordable over something expensive. The reasoning is that a green product has no impact if the middle class doesn’t buy into it. So the fact that everyone is broke and thinking green is a great thing. We are being forced to pull green from the grips of “high end” niche production and find creative ways to make them affordable.

So with the green show house I’m pushing hard to dispel the myth that green is more expensive than other products and I’m targeting the middle sector that owns the majority of the brownstones. In fact I’d like to show that it is actually cheaper to buy green since the resources are used more intelligently and there is less waste.

This comes mostly from a practical point of view since in this economy I think nobody will buy it unless it is priced competitively anyway. And I can probably say that increasingly people won’t buy it unless it is green as well. There is a double bottom line developing in consumerism: green and affordable. it may not be mainstream but it is at least gaining in numbers.

But because quality green still isn’t entirely mainstream there remains considerable competitive advantage to selling green products and any cut in price is made up by less competition and better market placement now and in the future.

There is a changing of the guard and the competitively priced green companies will emerge as the leaders. The companies making non-green products and/or expensive ones will fall to the side and become niche markets.

Firstly the greenest thing [...]]]>

I think the New York and Brooklyn brownstones are ideal candidates for green renovations. They have all the ingredients that make for an easy and powerful green overhaul. I can’t list them without sounding like a sales pitch, but it’s more pride of Brooklyn than me trying to sell anything.

Firstly the greenest thing you could do in a building is reuse an old one, and what is more perfect than the shell of a beautiful brownstone. Usually all four walls are more than fine for keeping. They have been there for a hundred years and can last another hundred. Now that is green!

If anything you want to rip off the layers of lead laden sheet rock and expose the interior brick walls (at least the ones that aren’t external facing walls). This means no new sheet rock and studs, which means less resources used.

Just the mere fact that Brownstones share side walls with the neighbors means less energy lost to the outside and half the materials needed to build.

Another tenet of green is not taking up virgin nature. Brownstones are densely packed together, which leaves more of the world for uninhabited rolling hills and nature.

The bones of brownstones are solid. They have lots of old hardwood. NY isn’t called the Gotham Forest for nothing. We have more excellent old growth timber in this city than exists in the wild. That is a sad thought, but the good news is that it is sitting protected under cheap vinyl floors and cracking tiles just waiting to be reclaimed to its true beauty.

Whether you cut the old joists into siding, floors, studs, or new joists, the wood is good and strong. In our Brooklyn green show house renovation we have done all of that with the old wood.

Brownstones have plenty of bricks. They are strong and beautiful. We are using them for new walls, patios, walkways and fireplaces. likewise for slate, either on walls or walkways.

Brownstones have nice flat roofs that are perfect for gardens, solar and hot water panels and decks. For some reason they weren’t built for use and for the most part have spent a hundred years ignored. But their value is great. We are using the show house roof for all of the above plus a bee hive . We have strengthened the roof with salvaged joists and it is strong as ever.

Brownstones are small. McMansions are a waste of everything. But New Yorkers, with our small apartments and large spirit, have been living green for years without knowing it. New York is one of the only places in the United States that shares an average house size with the rest of the world. Most of the United States has two or three times the house size as the rest of the world and wastes energy accordingly.

New Yorkers have much less cars than other Americans. There are even New Yorkers without driver’s licenses! Blasphemy! A Brooklyn brownstone is often within walking distance of good transport and amenities. This means less driving and specifically less asphalt for parking spaces, another feature many normal homes suffer from. Instead, a Brownstone has a great front yard area for greening.

New York is a center of commerce. This means most of the materials are local. Sand, glass, cement, wood, stone, metal…it can all be acquired locally. There is great economy of scale to be located in such a dense commercial and residential area. When a truck brings material to New York it is feeding a hundred houses, instead of only a couple in the countryside.

I am very excited to be doing a green renovation on a Brownstone. Because of all the in built green features of Brownstones it is relatively easy to turn a Brownstone into a very green and more comfortable home.

Last time I checked they had interesting material on:

Energy Efficiency in New York City Energy Efficient & Quality Lighting Architectural Daylighting in New York City [...]]]>

Here are some good PowerPoint from different trainings from the NYC Dept of sustainable Design. You can get a pretty good idea of the course from the slides.

Last time I checked they had interesting material on:

Energy Efficiency in New York City
Energy Efficient & Quality Lighting
Architectural Daylighting in New York City
Commissioning for DDC Projects
LEED & Local Law 86
Recycled Content & Low-Toxicity Materials
Construction Waste Management
Local Law 77: Ultra-low sulfur diesel and emission reduction for construction vehicles

MNN.com, a pretty cool “Mother Nature Network” featured Brooklyn as a green destination of the week. Eco Brooklyn was mentioned in the article:

“Brooklyn residents can now stretch out in new green-friendly [...]]]>

Above: A tomato plant growing out of the sidewalk at the green show house. You can’t get more local than that!

MNN.com, a pretty cool “Mother Nature Network” featured Brooklyn as a green destination of the week. Eco Brooklyn was mentioned in the article:

“Brooklyn residents can now stretch out in new green-friendly living quarters through Eco-Brooklyn Inc. The green real estate, renovation and developmen…” read more.

It is nice to get the positive attention. Eco Brooklyn Inc. was specifically named to represent a local focus. Being green is very much about being local. Local materials, local labor, and local community.

If we make a wonderful place where we live then we don’t need to take “escapism vacations” (I just coined that away from our home. Who would want to escape from something wonderful!

Long Live Eco in Brooklyn!