Green building was the topic of this morning’s WCPN Sound of Ideas show, with our very own director of the GreenCityBlueLake Institute David Beach as a panelist.

It’s exciting, as David said during the program, to see so much interest in green building. As Oberlin Environmental Studies Associate Professor John Petersen said, the pace of new green buildings has picked up around the region and country in the last few years.

Our coverage of the green building industry in Northeast Ohio includes some of the early successes that paved the way—from the story of the Cleveland Environmental Center (pictured right) and The Cleveland EcoVillage townhomes and cottages to resources like the Top Ten Things You Can Do to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint. We're also interested in how green building fits into the larger conversation of sustainability, such as what part buildings play in reducing our carbon footprint, and how can we retrofit cities so that buildings, land and natural resources support each other?

We’re keeping our eye on new centers of thought and practice like the Affordable Green Housing Center at Environmental Health Watch and their interest in piloting deep energy retrofits of existing homes in Cleveland (an important issue raised by a caller to the show). And we’ll provide updates on the progress of the SmartHome, a very green house GCBL and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History are building at the museum in University Circle as an exhibit of local green building technology and as a showcase of how a passive house looks and performs—it will be so energy efficient, that no furnace is required!

Whether you’re building new or retrofitting existing buildings (still the greenest act you can make), you can find many resources and supporting groups locally and nationally. Here are just a few:

Green building resources

Home

• The Northeast Ohio Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council
• Heights Home Repair Resource Center
• Cleveland Restoration Society
• Home Builders Northeast Ohio Green Building Initiative
• Recycling in apartment and condo complexes in Northeast Ohio

Business

• The E4S Sustainable Business Directory
• COSE Small Business Energy Solutions
• The Cuyahoga Solid Waste District (ask for Business Resource Specialist, Beau Daane)
• Zerolandfill Cleveland

See plenty more green building resources and articles about local green buildings at the GCBL Green Building page