I found this and thought I might share it here and get the word out. The US EPA and the AIA along with others are putting on a design competition for professionals and students alike.

The stated objective for the competition are:

# Create designs that facilitate local building materials reuse
# Consider the full lifecycle of buildings and materials—from resource extraction through occupancy and, finally, deconstruction and reuse
# Focus on quality and creativity of designs and concepts
# Develop strategies that maximize materials recovery
# Reduce the overall embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions of building materials through reuse
# Decrease environmental and economic costs
# Address real world issues

Even if you don't want to enter, I think this is worth following just to see what's going on is the green building world.

Wow, I searched for the site and that really looks cool. Some of the winners are really thoughtful and well designed.

I thought I would include the site since I think you forgot.

http://www.lifecyclebuilding.org/index.php

Impressive competition and a great way to usher in new innovation. Do they make these people with the design only stuff do market research to see if these things would even sell? Building green is good and all but if no one buys it, then its just a pile of materials wasting away.

457, thanks for putting the address up, it totally slipped my mind.

Interesting contest. Talking of building materials, I am reminded of a related eco development that is happening in the context of capturing CO2 in building materials.

Yep, a company called Calera is trying to make Cement companies capture the CO2(http://powerplantccs.com/blog/2010/...ement.html ) they are releasing within the cement itself. All right, this process has many skeptics, but it is quite an interesting idea. We need all kinds of ideas in order to get ourselves out of the global warming problem, and this could be one such.

Coming back to sustainable and energy efficient building materials, one company that comes to mind that is doing some serious work is Serious Materials (http://www.seriousmaterials.com/ ).

solarant. I don't see the great benefit. We need to think big to get ourselves out of this hole. Sure if you come up with 1000 ideas that each deal with .001% of current emissions and energy use you end up with a 1% reduction but we need an 80% reduction or greater. I don't see that many little ideas on the table. We need to look at consumption of materials and reduce that rather than trying to figure out how we can use the same amount with less impact.

Capturing CO2 is a pipe dream and hasn't been thought out well. I keep asking myself, Where are you going to put it after you capture it? Its not like it goes away. CO2 capture is a catch phrase to make industry look like they care. I would prefer to see any industry reduce CO2 emissions by 50% than hear a claim that they can capture 100% of it.

Every small idea is needed. If not to solve the problem, at least to build some momentum. There is HUGE push back on all ideas that ultimately change the way we build and the way we live. The small ideas may not be enough to save us, but they are the beginning of the movement.