December Member Meeting - Green Gone Bad: Examples of Unintended Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) Consequences

Green Gone Bad: Examples of Unintended Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) Consequences (Joint meeting with IAQA)

Speaker: Derrick A. Denis (Dĕn-āy), CIEC, CIAQP, CAC, V.P. of IEQ for Clark Seif Clark, Inc. (CSC) in Tempe, AZ

“Green Buildings”, for all their merits and good intentions, can be flawed, when it comes to occupant comfort and occupant health.  Green buildings are often carefully designed and constructed to use recycled, recyclable, locally produced, renewable and energy efficient materials, but indoor environmental quality or IEQ is habitually not high on the priority list of even the most vigilant of green designers and builders.

Aside from sometimes overlooking IEQ, green buildings are often plagued by the “Devil that we don’t know.”  New, unproven building materials or installation techniques applied to save money or save the environment can wreak unexpected consequences on IEQ.  Like our bodies, a building is a collection of individual materials (think tissues).  These materials make up building components (think organs).  Groups of components make up building systems (think body systems like respiratory, circulatory, nervous, etc.).  These systems all work independently and collectively in a complicated puzzle make up the whole building or the body.  Insult, remove or damage one piece of this complicated puzzle in a building or a body and the entire structure can become ill.

Come and learn about a variety of “green building” techniques that negatively impacted actual buildings.  We will discuss the who, what, when, where and why of various failures.  We will provide real world examples.  We will discuss lessons learned in order to help in the mitigation or prevention of these green-gone-bad examples.