Hey Wha' Happened?

You may have noticed Real Life LEED has taken a rather lengthy hiatus, and I feel like it probably time to fill you in. Since my last post I've left my position as a researcher at LS3P ASSOCIATES LTD., moved over a thousand miles from Charleston, SC to Cambridge, MA, and took a job as a High Performance Building Specialist in the Green Building Services unit at Harvard University. Please consider my current posting slackness within the context that I just had to move 1,000 miles north and it's hard to type in the cold.

What does this mean? For one, I'll be seeing a much higher volume of LEED projects and project reviews. Just today I was working on gathering all of our office's GBCI reviews, combining them by credit, and then presenting to our group on common mistakes. Clearly this has blog post written all over it, but some of this material may go on Harvard's Green Building Resource instead. We haven't worked out the details yet, but I'm likely to be contributing to both websites as part of my day to day duties. Long time readers may remember a post on that very resource way back in 2008, but if you haven't seen this before you should go right now!

Many thanks and much credit for the start of Real Life LEED should go to staff and management at LS3P... I wouldn't have been able to do begin posting if they didn't have a policy of sharing what they learn with the world, and I learned everything I know about LEED today from projects and coworkers there.

For the next month or so I suspect posting will still be pretty slow as I get settled, so please bear with me... Thanks for reading!

PS - I know some of you expected the Hey Wha Happened guy to be part of this post... you're welcome!

15 comments:

Joe Stampone said...

Congrats on the new job! The Harvard Green Building Resource is a great aggregation of green building information. Harvard is certainly leading the way in sustainable building. I'm a member of a team of students at NYU which is working with the office of sustainability to help pre-certify a number of new buildings for LEED. NYU would love to create a database similar to Harvard's Green Building Resource, however NYU lacks the quantity of green buildings. I look forward to hearing about your experience in your new position.

Keep up the great work!

Jen said...

Congrats on the new job. I'm sure the move was exhausting. I just found your blog. I look forward to reading more.

Rachel Burton said...

Congratulations on your new job!
We'll miss your contribution to the 'greening' of Charleston and South Carolina

Larry C. Sims said...

congratulations and best wishes working with one of best environmental stewards out there today.

Valerie said...

I'm confused and frustrated by something that's going on in Baltimore and you sound like a good person to point me in the right direction on finding some answers. We've been setting up office recycling programs since 1988 and many of our mutlti-tenant programs have been going strong since then. Recently, several of our buidlings began dropping our programs in favor of single stream - citing the need to "divert more trash from the landfills" (sic)as they apply for LEED certification. I am not aware of any studies of single stream in multi-tenant office buildings, and one cannot extrapolate from data from residential curbside programs. Moreover, in Baltimore, the glass collected is intentionally broken and used as "alternative daily cover" in landfills. This is NOT diverting MORE material from landfills and I am certain that most people would be upset to find that what they've collected is going to the landfill anyway, albeit in smaller pieces. I am hoping that the USGBC and LEED leadership would want the applicants to not only minimize what enters the waste stream but also maximize what is recycled and will help educate them to this end.

Unknown said...

Congratulations on moving on to the next chapter in your career, Joel. It's great that you'll be working with such a distinguished leader in the sustainable building field. However, I hope you will continue the Real Life LEED blog, as I doubt you can communicate in the same voice and perspective on the HGBR site that you can here, and the uniqueness and candor of your approach, which you've shared for several years now, has been very much appreciated.

Edgar Farrera said...

Congrats on the new job! I remember the original post about Harvard - and now you are working at the Mother Lode!!

Unknown said...

Congratulations, Joel - what a great place to be! I took a Harvard Continuing Ed class that was taught by, among others, Leith Sharp & Jesse Foote. So I'm envious, to say the least :)

Kelly said...

Congrats on the new job! I hope that you continue to blog because your insight is invaluable and definitely helps me all the time not to reinvent the wheel.

Thanks for putting it out there!

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Anonymous said...

When can we expect you to be starting up again. I do like your blog.

Heat Pumps Installation said...

Congrats on the new job, My all wishes with you do handwork make life..
Thank you for post.

Nick said...

I have a question for you which I think you can answer as you are "High Performance Building Specialist". :)

I have been debating with a friend about converted shipping containers as green homes. I believe that using recycled shipping containers to build homes, shelters etc is "green". My friend doesn't think so based on the materials they are made from

What do you think?

Laurent Kanago said...

Are you/your department also responsible for the Green Leaf program? I was wondering how that compliments or clashes with your LEED work.