“Thousands of Florida homeowners who have installed – or who are planning to install – solar power and/or new, energy-efficient heating and cooling systems might not get the rebate they had expected from the state until at least November.

That’s because, Gov. Charlie Crist says, Florida’s Legislative Budget Commission failed to approve the use of $31.5 million in federal money for an energy rebate program. And it’s money that could be held up until after the November elections.

"The money is already in the state," said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for Gov. Charlie Crist. “We just need the legislative spending authority (in order) to spend it.”

via Florida energy rebates on hold; Gov. Crist blames Legislature | Gainesville.com.

Trish Riley is the author of the award-winning Complete Idiot's Guide to Green Living (Penguin/Alpha Books 2007) and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Greening Your Business (with Heather Gadonniex, Penguin/Alpha Books 2009). Trish was gracious enough to talk about how we can take care of getting rid of odors in a non-toxic way. It’s a great piece to share with your residents:

via 1,000 Green Building Superintendents – Our Plan for a Greener New York City.

Denise Robinette, owner of Healthy Living Interiors, designed this room and is helping me with the green renovation of my little cottage! Kudos, Denise!

“Merkiyah Jones can now breathe easier thanks to a Healthy-N-Green Bedroom Makeover.Jones, a fourth-grader at Watkins Elementary School in West Park, was treated to the makeover after she won the Asthma Awareness Day Poster Contest.

Denise Robinette, president of HealthyLiving Interiors, volunteered to do the project after she was approached by Adella Earle, the Broward school district’s coordinator for asthma improvement management.

“Everyone can benefit from good indoor air quality,” said Robinette, who enlisted the help of several donors and sponsors for the project.

Environmentally friendly products were donated, including a chemical-free mattress and dust mite covers for the bed, a year’s supply of hypoallergenic air filters, eco-friendly window treatments and a recycled desk worktop. The family also pitched in to help.

“They were a part of transforming their bedroom,” Robinette said. “The kids painted the furniture, and I tried to make it as fun as possible.”

via West Park girl gets room makeover after winning Asthma Awareness Day Poster Contest – Sun Sentinel.

A new study that measures levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in homes in two cities  found similar levels of the chemicals in both settings. These results indicate that exposure to the compounds is widespread.

The health impacts of endocrine disruptors, which mimic naturally occurring human hormones, are still being studied. But concern is mounting that these chemicals could be partly to blame for aberrations in child development, including early puberty and breast development in girls as young as 7 or 8.

The study, published online this month in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, was funded by The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and The New York Community Trust.

via New Study Asks: Is Your Home Trying to Kill You? – New America Media.

What Is Your Water Footprint?

Take a water tour with [The Green Guide] through your home, garden, diet, energy use, and your stuff! Then, pledge to cut your water footprint by 20%.

via Water Footprint Calculator – National Geographic.

These stunning detailed pictures magnified by over a million times reveal the true face of the hidden horrors in your home.

Seen through an ultra-powerful Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), these tiny creatures are some of several types of insect living undetected right under our noses.

One of the images taken using the SEM, which can cost up to £500,000, shows a house dust mite – millions of which inhabit every home.

Extreme close-ups of the creepy crawlies that infest our homes | Mail Online.

Riley recently co-directed the First Annual Gainesville Environmental Film and Arts Festival, which was in collaboration with GoGreenNation.org. She admits she was so overwhelmed with festival-related tasks that promoting her site fell by the wayside. But the festival embodied the greater mission of GoGreenNation.org: to build a community of concerned citizens with a heart and a sharp, informed mind for all things green.

via Kennedy: Ride-Along: GoGreenNation.org.

…Because flame retardants don’t break down easily, they remain for years in the tissues of birds, aquatic organisms and mammals, including us, albeit in small quantities. An endocrine disruptor and neurotoxin, the retardants are linked to thyroid disorders and reproductive problems in animals and humans.

A dedicated young environmental chemist and new mother, [Heather] Stapleton has become something of a flame-retardant queen. She tested house dust from across the country and determined that it’s the major pathway of exposure to flame retardants for children, pets, and adults. The chemicals in dust come mostly from furniture and electronics. She’s currently in the process of testing 100 baby products for flame retardants. (Manufacturers are generally loath to offer any information on which chemicals their products contain and labeling is not required.)

I haven’t decided yet what to do with my couch. Landfill? Hazardous waste?

via Why are flame retardants required in furniture, anyway? – By Florence Williams – Slate Magazine.

So Teddi’s cough was really getting bad and I had always known that our home had a potential danger from the laminate floors. Ever since I’d moved in, I was often bothered by a sickeningly sweet smell in the mornings – after the house had been closed up all night – and I suspected that it could be formaldehyde off-gassing from the pressed-wood flooring. The vet had ruled out kennel cough and suggested that she might have tracheal collapse, a common condition in older small dogs that could be exacerbated by intubation, which she’d had in her recent surgery.

Researching tracheal collapse, I learned that while it is not unusual or fatal, it can be aggravated by poor indoor air quality. So I decided it was time to find out whether our home was thick with formaldehyde. I found a test kit at a nearby lab, and bought it for about $40. It was a simple assembly that I opened up and positioned at Teddi’s height level for 48 hours, then sent back to the lab for analysis.

The first report was incorrectly based on a 24-hour test and the result was .05 ppm; but I conducted a 48-hour test, and the second report based on that info indicated a level of .02 ppm. Not as bad, but still higher than the ‘recommended’ .008 ppm for constant exposure – this is calculated by the EPA for people, not five lb. dogs. The lab report read:

“The U.S. EPA and The American Lung Association recommend a maximum level of 0.1 ppm for formaldehyde in indoor air. Because some people may be sensitive to lower concentrations, the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry has recommended Minimum Risk Levels (MRL’s) that depend on the duration of personal exposure.

Below the MRL, there are no significant health effects in most people.

MRL=0.04ppm (1 to 14 days exposure)
MRL=0.03 ppm (14 to 364 days exposure)
MRL=0.008 ppm (365 or more days exposure)”

I am not a scientist or statistician, but it certainly looked to me like our level of exposure, whether .02 or .05 ppm was significantly higher than the minimum risk level of .008 ppm recommended for constant exposure. I do know that the MRL is based on a full-size human, not the body size of a child or pet. I checked with a couple of environmental scientists who might be able to confirm my conclusion, but was unable to get any kind of definitive corroboration immediately. None-the-less, I agreed with my friend Carol Goodwin, co-owner of Goodwin Heartpine Lumber who had been exposed to formaldehyde in her home years ago, and said she had experienced some health effects. Carol encouraged me to replace the fake-wood floors with some of her beautiful solid wood flooring or their new product, Precision Engineered wood floors which are similar to laminate products except they’re made with several thin layers of solid wood, glued together with a very low formaldehyde adhesive. Since I was trying to get away from formaldehyde, and I was concerned that wood flooring would look too fancy in my rustic little cottage, I wasn’t sure about wood flooring, but I knew that I needed some different kind of floor. So I accepted Carol’s offer to come over on a Sunday morning to help me pull up the fake-wood floors. We didn’t know whether we’d be successful, but decided to get started on the project and if it turned out to be more than we could handle, I’d find professionals to finish the job.

I ran into another friend, Robert Pearce, at a party on Saturday night. Robert owns several rental properties and handles all of his own maintenance. I told him what we were planning to do the next day, and he offered to stop by and assess the project and give us his advice. Robert showed up at 11 a.m. and took a look around. “I can tell you one thing,” he said as he observed my waterbed in the bedroom. “You’ll never get the floors pulled up out of this house in one day.”

Although Robert hadn’t planned to get involved in helping us with the project, within a few minutes we were pulling furniture to one side of the living room. He went to the sliding glass doorway on the east side of the room, where the raw edges of the flooring were exposed, and lifted a section with his hand. We knew the floors were free-floating, but we were surprised at how easily they lifted up and pulled apart. By the time Carol arrived at noon, we had pulled up nearly half of the living room floor – Robert lifting the boards and me carrying them out the door.

Carol and I got to work emptying my waterbed, and soon we three had finished the living room and were able to move the bedroom furniture out and pull up the rest of the fake-wood flooring. I wanted to just throw out the laminate, but Carol and Robert convinced me to stack it carefully in the house to protect it from the elements until I figured out what to do with it.

By 1:45 p.m., we were done with the floors and having a lovely lunch on the back deck overlooking my little forest. I was amazed!

But I had no idea what a cesspool of problems I’d released… On Monday morning I got a call from David Harlos, a PhD trained at the Harvard School of Public Health, who’d read my formaldehyde test results. “It’s a good thing you got that stuff out of your house – no wonder your dog is sick!”

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Nightmare on 21st Avenue

Paul Holland and Linda Yates thought it only natural, when they set out to build a luxury home six years ago, that theirs would be the world’s greenest. In Silicon Valley—where Holland works as a venture capitalist and Yates as a management consultant—even competition is environmentally conscious.

The couple’s 5,600-square-foot home will be outfitted with a host of aggressively eco-friendly technologies and materials: a recycled-steel roof that diverts rainwater to a 50,000-gallon underground cistern; reclaimed stone left over from the construction of Chicago skyscrapers; solar panels powerful enough to provide electricity to the home, charge five electric cars, and still return energy to the grid; a cedar interior cut from sustainable forests (where trees are selectively harvested to minimize environmental damage); doors and windows of Portuguese eucalyptus approved by the Forest Stewardship Council; oak floors salvaged from old granaries; recycled-glass sinks; a recycled-steel kitchen hood.

via Xanadu – Magazine – The Atlantic.