Arrrrr ye gettin’ more done now?Official White House photostream via flickr[UPDATE: A White House spokesperson called me to clarify that it’s parts of the White House complex, not the White House itself, that will be seeking LEED certification. Like many others in the blogosphere, I got swept up in the excitement of imagining hemp sheets in the Lincoln bedroom. Maybe next year—meanwhile, just mutter “complex” to yourself each time you read the phrase White House here.]

The benefits of green building are becoming clearer all the time: A study released this week suggests that employees in greener buildings are more productive and take fewer sick days than those in non-green buildings. The same day the study came out, news was spreading that the White House would pursue LEED certification—a goal that is, says U.S. Green Building Council president Rick Fedrizzi, “absolutely possible and viable.”

While the feds explore options including window films, waste reduction, and smarter energy use, I found myself wondering just one thing: If greener buildings mean more productive employees, will working in a LEED-certified White House mean Obama can finally get some shit done?

To find an answer to this carefully considered question, I decided to survey a few in the know. First I contacted Norm Miller of the University of San Diego’s Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate, who co-authored the productivity study. He immediately answered my question in the spirit in which it was asked. “Clearly Obama is a slacker and he eats fast food and smokes, so just think what he could do in a greener White House,” Miller said.  “Our health-care system and budget deficit would probably have been solved by now if the President had clean air to breathe and better natural light.”

Bill Walsh, founder of the Healthy Building Network, echoed the importance of clean air and natural light where productivity is concerned—though he wondered, given the fact that LEED’s clean-air guidelines offer credit for banning smoking, if we might “expect to see the President huddled under the portico smoking a butt.”

Urban-planning expert Tim Halbur of Planetizen had his own thoughts on the clean-air connection: “The interesting factor in the productivity story is the effect of air quality on health and feelings of well-being. Just getting dust, mold, and germs properly filtered appears to mean that 45 percent of people have 2.88 fewer sick days each year. Who knows what Obama could accomplish with an extra 2.88 days a year? Maybe bring peace to Israel, just with a little better air conditioning.”

And then there was former Sierra Club press secretary Eric Antebi, now a VP at Fenton Communications: “Hard to say how much it will help productivity, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Unless he were to trip over a low-flow toilet and fall head first into a stack of low-VOC paint cans. That could hurt a lot.”

And do these keen observers have any ideas for how the White House could be greener? You betcha. “As I said in a recent Grist interview, living densely is the easiest way to go green,” Halbur said. “So Obama already has that going for him—he’s got zero commute. He walks to work by going down the hall. So he’s already in great shape. As we know, the worst culprit in carbon footprint is air travel, so I suppose if he swapped Air Force One and Marine One (the helicopter) for some sort of zeppelin that runs on solar power he’d be better off.”

Obama, we’re just tee-sing. We know you work your putt off.Official White House photostream via flickrAlexander Lee, founder and director of Project Laundry List, says the answer is blowing in the wind: “A clothesline at the White House would herald a new age of leadership and demonstrate an understanding on the part of the Obamas that we need a new economy.” Lee says Americans’ post-War love affair with machines “has made us fat, kept us cut off from the outdoors, and chained us to a desk to earn enough money for all this stuff that is really detrimental to the environment and not necessary for a healthy, happy existence.”

Walsh of HBN had another innovative suggestion for the White House green team: “Maybe Van Jones can be brought back in order to get credit for using recycled materials.” (In fact, Jones’s former employer, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is leading the LEED charge; at press time, I was still playing e-tag with a spokesperson to get their take.)

Whatever the upgrades, USD study co-author Miller concludes that a greener White House is long overdue: “Our prior President Bush probably did not realize why his brain functioned so slowly at times. We suspect now, after careful scientific study, that Bush’s vocabulary would have likely reached that of a tenth grader had he lived in a better environment.”

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Even as China overtakes the U.S. in the dubious category of “world’s leading greenhouse gas producer,” it is also well ahead of the U.S. in developing the technologies and policies to solve the problem -- and selling those solutions to us at massive profits which could have been ours.

On a recent trip, I saw entire Chinese towns powered by farm waste and enough windmills for jousts with ten thousand Don Quixotes. As you read this, China will have just surpassed the U.S. as the leading producer of wind turbines, many of which are exported at very high margins. And to get a sense of just how fast China is leaving us in their rearview mirror, consider this: the Golden Dragon has doubled its wind capacity every year since 2004.

Solar too. I wrote a speech for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005 when he visited China on a trade mission. He spoke at Tsinghua University in Beijing, "China’s MIT,” and held up the world’s most efficient solar cell, designed by Silicon Valley’s SunPower Corporation. The cells were being manufactured in China for export back to the states, but SunPower had to double capacity because of Chinese domestic demand. Schwarzenegger noted that a student in the audience might design the next/better solar cell someday -- and every head nodded with knowing smiles. So while we have already lost the battle for low-cost, high-tech manufacturing, we may soon lose bragging rights and IP royalties when our designs are surpassed by China.

One reason China is leaving us in the dust is a shrewd government that has invested 40% of its stimulus funding in green companies, compared to just 12% by U.S. taxpayers, ensuring the rapid growth of the economic gift that keeps on giving. They also get the money out the door -- compare our Department of Energy, which is still mired in communist-era bureaucracy and can’t ever seem to pull the trigger on loan guarantees/grants for projects that actually work. The secret is that the Chinese government fast-tracks projects that create economies of scale, recently approving a 25 square mile solar farm. That helps Chinese companies get costs down and become even more competitive globally.

The final ingredient in the fast-rising Chinese cleantech soufflé is finance. When I spoke in Hong Kong to investors, pension funds, and shoe shine boys with coins to invest, they are all putting money into these clean technology companies and looking for more. That includes real estate investors, who are looking for green development projects with LEED or other certified efficiencies. My firm, Pegasus Sustainable Century Merchant Bank, recently partnered with Ross Perot’s Hillwood Realty to host a US tour for the China Real Estate Chamber of Commerce and 30 of their investors. They’re looking at green projects, but also figuring out which energy efficiency and green building products they can take back to China for use in their own developments.

But never fear: everyone I spoke to in China’s government and private sector was very polite. They are willing to share all of this with the rest of the world -- at the right price, of course. See you at the race track!

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Far from their sometimes musty, dusty reputations, many museums in the U.S. stand on the cutting edge of eco-innovation. Whether it’s behind the scenes (using recycled materials to build exhibits, renovating to LEED standards) or inescapably out front (a whole museum dedicated to wind power), museums are showing visitors the green light. Take our tour—admission is free!

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I'm in decent shape for 52, but it took everything I had to carry a hefty piece of welded steel plate out of the backyard -- and I didn't place it any too gently on the curb when I got it there. So I was impressed when John from Blue Scrap & Recycling casually flipped the hunk of metal into his truck without apparent effort. John suggested we ought to give him a call when we have more demo work. "We're used to moving heavy stuff around," he said. "Plaster and wood, that's kid's stuff." Even so, it took John and a crew of four a full afternoon to rip out our old heating plant.

The oil furnace, tank, and gas boiler that took up half the basement will be replaced in the JP Green House by an efficient air circulation system, heat exchange unit, and a small electric heating element, drawing as little power as a intermittent hair dryer. Supplemental heating will only be required on the very coldest days, provided by a wood or pellet stove (which only need burn for brief intervals), and air conditioning will not be neccessary.

Heating a home with a hair dryer -- that is the astounding promise of passivhaus, the state-of-the-art energy efficient construction standard that's so far ahead of the envelope in U.S. building codes that structures built to passivhaus code score low in Energy Star and LEED rankings; that's because neither standard accounts for buildings so tight and well insulated that they don't require traditional heating plants (and lose points in the ratings game for having none!).

Minneapolis blower door.The Energy Conservatory.Placetailor's Pratt House project illustrates the point. The super-insulated home of Simon Hare, founder of Placetailor, built on the footprint of a 100-year-old gunsmith shop on Fort Hill in Roxbury, scored an astonishing 0.6 in volume of air replacement in a recent blower test (dead-on for the passivhaus standard and difficult to achieve in a very small spaces). In the test, a large fan is attached to a door to create a partial vacuum, and the rate at which air filters into the structure gives an accurate picture of the tightness of its envelope.

Passivhaus certification sets tough standards for air tightness, heating, and total energy consumption, and recommends three additonal measurements covering window efficiency, peak heating, and ventilation heat recovery. Taken together, these criteria ensure a snug, parsimonious, well ventilated space, intelligently oriented to prevailing weather and the path of the sun, that stays cool in summer, as old adobe buildings do in the Southwest, and hoards heat from appliances, bodies, and lighting so well that it remains pleasant and warm without additional heating on all but the coldest days.

Energy savings (and avoided carbon emissions) are immense. The JP Green House aims to use less than 4.75 kBtu/sq. foot per year in heating, an austounding 1/8 of the 40.5 kBtu/sq. ft. of our estimated past energy expenditures in a barely insulated structure with cracks wide enough to admit daylight. (Based on U.S. Energy Information Administration 2001 survey data.) The comparison with average U.S. housing stock, and even Energy Star-certified homes, shown in the chart below is no less remarkable. If we are able to install pv solar and micro-wind, it will be no great trick to reach negative (net) carbon emissions and become a small electric power generator.

Challenges. The challenges confronting our design/build team at Placetailor are mountainous. To meet exacting passivhaus standards on a shoestring budget in a rickety 100-year-old building abandoned for the last five years is tough by any measure, but Andrée and I have heaped on additional burdens by our persnickety insistence on certain aesthetic considerations. We are assuredly among the very few climate-conscious homeowners called to task by our designers for not daring to dream large enough in reducing our own carbon footprint.

Take the matter of the windows. To minimize energy loss and maximize passive solar heating in winter months, it makes sense to virtually eliminate openings on the north side and install large windows on the south to warm concrete floors and retain energy, which radiates into living space at night. From the perspective of energy expenditure, there is no utility to windows on the east and west sides and the strict dictates of the passivhaus standards encourage designers to limit their size or do away with them entirely. This can be handled in new construction by turning south-facing walls into a curtain of glass -- with shades, screens, and even intelligent planting of deciduous trees and vines to provide summertime shade -- but such a solution is out of reach in our constrained budget.

But forgoing those windows is a problem for us. We do not want to lose the view on our west side, which looks onto our garden, nor on the east, which commands a fine prospect of the intersection anchored by our former corner store and cemeteries further down Bourne Street, and we worry about how our demonstration home will be received by an American audience who will not find appealing, it seems safe to say, any house that feels dark and closed in. Placetailor cut the Gordian knot of the windows by designing permanently emplaced, triple-paned picture windows with small venting casements on the side, and will custom-craft insulated shutters to cut heat loss at night.

Another example of tradeoffs was whether to use cellulose or recycled-foam insulation. The choice matters, in terms of modeling low-carbon impact construction pathways; cellulose is a clear winner, but it also means a four-inch difference in how much interior space is lost. In the end, we decided to do both, employing an innovative construction solution devised by Placetailor using recycled cellulose on the second floor and installing recycled foam on the first.

These are just two example amid many of the tradeoffs between cutting carbon emissions to the bone -- the imperative on which averting collapse of civilization depends -- our personal wants and sensibilities, and our best guess as to the comforts, aestetics, and amenities essential to winning acceptance by a wider audience.

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Vancouver’s vision for its Olympic village looks dazzling from afar, like the city itself. Up close the details get hairier.Photo: ecstaticistThe city of Vancouver, British Columbia, has a lot to brag about. It's got an enviable location, wedged between the Strait of Georgia and the snow-capped Coast Mountains. It's a perennial winner of "most livable cities" rankings, thanks in part to its parks, arts, and the Canadian social safety net. Its youthful mayor, Gregor Robertson, talks up the city as the greenest in North America and has laid out a plan to make it the most sustainable city in the world.

So you better believe the city will be showing off its environmental credentials when it hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics next February. "Greening" the Olympics has become an expectation, after all (see Turin's recycling programs and Beijing's attempt at air quality improvements). As the largest city ever to host the Winter Games, Vancouver intends to make sustainability central to its Olympic legacy.

The centerpiece of those efforts will be the athletes' village at Southeast False Creek, an 80-acre rehabbed brownfield that lies across a "false creek" from the downtown peninsula. There, a $1 billion city-within-a-city is rising in preparation for next year's Olympic and Paralympic athletes. For years the city eyed the site as a place to try out a new kind of sustainable neighborhood. Winning the Olympic bid in 2003 provided the impetus.

Artist's rendering of the Olympic village. Watch a slide show about the project.The development is distinctively European in its design, an odd influence in a city that can already feel more Asian than North American (See a slide show about the project.) Elsewhere in the city, the "Vancouverist" architectural style highlights slender towers that provide high density while preserving open view corridors (to take in the surrounding water and mountains). But at Southeast False Creek, short, squat buildings push to the edge of narrow streets and courtyards, evoking Amsterdam more than Singapore. Plazas and inner courtyards emphasize shared space, and the streetscape design draws on the Dutch concept of woonerf, a combined sidewalk/street that uses paving and landscaping to encourage walkers, cyclists, slow-moving cars, and children at play to make room for each other.

"You're creating a better community feel because you have more eyes on the street, more people with contact with the street level, and less of that height that keeps people apart from each other," said Robin Petri, the city's project engineering manager.

Southeast False Creek's 16 buildings will include market-rate and affordable housing, a senior housing center, retail shops, a grocery store, a pharmacy, and eventually an elementary school. There are enough clean energy and conservation features to make the head spin—bioswales and wetlands to treat runoff water, rainwater cisterns that irrigate green roofs and flush gray-water toilets, solar-powered trash compactors, heat drawn from sewage pipes, a radiant heating and cooling system.

The development's layout emphasizes communal space, as with this waterfront boardwalk, a nod to one of the site's past uses as a shipyard.Photo: Jonathan HiskesIf it sounds a lot like every other Cool Green Building Project, fair enough. The village is LEED-ey, with expectations that 15 of the buildings will be certified gold and one platinum, under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard. The development is also participating in the pilot LEED neighborhood program. But it's not the highest-rated LEED project—that distinction currently goes to Dockside Green in nearby Victoria, B.C.

Southeast False Creek is notable more for its size—planners predict an eventual population of more than 10,000—and for the international attention it will receive in the Olympic spotlight.

Design manager Roger Bayley summarized the hope that the village's influence in architecture and planning circles will stretch far beyond Vancouver: "I personally believe it could have a very significant influence," he said. "It's being constructed on a scale and in a timeframe that is literally unheard of, except maybe in China. And it's embracing a whole series of innovations that I think many people … will be extraordinarily impressed with."

That's one potential legacy. There's another possibility. Seven months before opening ceremonies, a string of problems nearly as numerous as the clean-tech features threatens to eclipse the project's sustainability goals.

Overshadowing and complicating every other trouble is a financing mess rooted in last fall's credit crisis and mired in the real estate ­­­slump. The project was to be the first Olympic village that was largely funded by private sources and sold as market housing (they are typically built by governments and used afterward as low-income or senior housing). The city, which owns the land, was reportedly glad to avoid the responsibility of supervising construction and financing, while still standing to turn a profit on the project. It ceded much of that work to the developer Millennium Development Corporation. But Millenium's funding mechanism collapsed last October when the New York hedge fund Fortress Investment Group pulled out of the project, leaving the city holding the tab. The city council made arrangements, first in secret and then publicly, to shore up the project with tax money—now figured at $450 million Canadian ($403 million U.S.). City leaders hope they can recover the cost when the units are sold to private buyers for use after the Olympics. Of course, that depends on the real estate market.

A woonerf, or shared-used street, in Matsumoto, Japan. Southeast False Creek will employ similar narrow, winding byways. Photo: Cheryl & RichOther setbacks: Construction lags behind schedule, pressuring workers to meet a Nov. 1 deadline, when the development company hands control of 1,100 units to Olympic organizers. In late June, reports arose of a possible mold problem because of improper pipe installation. A goal that vegetation would cover 50 percent of the project's roof space has been scrapped, reportedly because insurers worried about flooding. [Correction: Petri said the project is on track to meet this target.]

The city also scaled back the amount of low-income and middle-income housing it originally pledged to include. It will now subsidize 252 low-income units, a target that has nearly doubled in cost, from $65 million to $110 million, The Vancouver Sun reports. The city has yet to determine who will qualify and how to select tenants for the subsidized dwellings, Petri said.

British Columbia's anti-Olympic protestors have also focused some of their disapproval on the development, even though Olympic housing will occupy only 50 of Southeast False Creek's 80 acres. Much of the development will be built after the games, and of course the whole village will last far longer than its use for the games. Still, planners have battled the perception that the short-term event influenced the city's long-term plan.

"This isn't really about the Olympics," said Petri. "The Olympics just provided us with a fixed timeline and an opportunity to give it lots of attention. But this was planned way before the Olympics. Whether someone's excited about the Olympics or not is really independent from how they feel about the site."

The project’s blocky buildings achieve the same density as many of the city’s tower housing developments, according to the city's project engineering manager, Robin Petri.Photo: Jonathan HiskesIt will be interesting to see which storylines prevail when the international media trains its eye on Vancouver next winter—the financial mess, the shrinking social-housing target, the clean-energy and water-use technologies, the attempt to build not just green buildings but an entire sustainable neighborhood, or something else altogether. Organizers have begun releasing an elaborate online book on their vision for the site, in monthly segments, to help along those glowing profiles. (To be fair, the publication includes some good information, not just PR.)

Assessing the project's long-term influence will be more difficult. Locally, it may wear down some of the resistance that comes with trying to build things differently. Bayley, the lead designer, spoke this spring about seeking permits to use harvested rainwater to flush toilets.

"You'd think that would be a simple thing to do, but persuading municipal authorities was not as simple as we'd hoped," he said. "We ended up putting signs on the toilet saying 'do not drink this water.' Then they wanted it translated into dog and cat."

Petri added later, "But now they've approved it, and the next attempt at this won't be as new to them." She said the project would help permitters, contractors, engineers, landscape architects, and others who work on it become comfortable with high-efficiency techniques. From there, she hopes, they might spread throughout the building and planning trades. In other words, despite all the attention that comes with being novel, the real goal of Southeast False Creek is to help such projects become normal.

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You know those words you're sick of, the little bits of lexicon used and abused so frequently that they've been drained of meaning: green, natural, eco-friendly? Well, now you can add the word "LEED" to the list.

That's right, the world's most ubiquitous green-building term is becoming a mot de greenwashing. Increasingly, companies and developers are using "LEED" to describe buildings that haven't been certified by the program. Heck, the buildings might not even be that green (or natural or eco-friendly, for that matter).

The Piedmont deck: LEED claims are the least of critics' complaintsUrban Hiking AtlantaTake, for instance, the highly controversial parking garage plopped in the middle of Atlanta's Piedmont Park. Conceived and championed by the Piedmont Park Conservancy and the Atlanta Botanical Garden as a way to raise funds and provide parking space for folks attending the park’s special events (like the upcoming "Green Concert" starring Sir Paul McCartney), this "built to LEED standards" structure has been largely derided by neighborhood groups, including Friends of Piedmont Park (FOPP), as being a decidedly improper use of park space.

"We're upset about the conversion of more public green space to cement and concrete," says Jack White, a FOPP board member. The six-and-a-half story parking deck holds 765 spaces and charges up to $15 per day, and required the creation of new roads bisecting the park. No amount of neighborhood opposition could stop it; in fact, the Conservancy and Garden are suing FOPP's leader, Doug Abramson, for the legal fees accrued in toppling FOPP's objections, some $273,000.

But the pro-parking deck forces point to its green attributes, and even named it "SAGE" -- for Safety Access Greenspace and Expansion. Per the Conservancy’s website, the garage was built to LEED standards, with shaded areas for cars to reduce heat island effect; increased access to the park for visitors; a "virtually invisible" structure within several years, when the potted trees finally blossom; special parking spots for hybrids and such; a top-level bike rack; and rainwater capture to irrigate the gardens. 

Hm. Other than the last two ingredients, pretty much none of its touted green factors are particularly green, nor are they part of the LEED system. In fact, the U.S. Green Building Council has no record of the SAGE parking facility—it was neither registered (the first step toward certification) nor certified. And a parking garage isn't eligible for LEED certification—a building, says Scot Horst, senior vice president of LEED, must have at least one resident to even be considered.

Foes of the parking deck weren't mollified by the LEED claims—"Putting trees in pots on a concrete monstrosity didn't transform the essential nature of the beast," says White—but the even more troubling thing, at least to the folks who oversee LEED, is the misuse of their carefully crafted system. LEED has endured a lot of criticism in its 13-year history—for being too complex, not accounting for regional differences, costing too much to achieve, etc.—and has responded with a user-friendlier version, dubbed LEED 3.0, this year. But, says Horst, if a project isn’t officially certified, “you have no idea what [developers] mean” when they use the term. (The Piedmont conservancy did not return email requests for comment.)

The Atlanta garage is not the only example of such LEEDwashing; take the new KFC/Taco Bell in super-crunchy Northampton, Mass. The USGBC also says it has no record of such a building being certified*, though a press release detailed its LEED elements: 30 percent energy and water use reduction, rainwater capture, solar panels. Harvested rainwater or not, the building's function as a purveyor of industrial food does plenty of climate harm, not to mention its drive-thru window. Who knew LEED would grow to be a tool of architectural irony?

Still, says Horst, even a falsely claimed LEED building might be an improvement over business as usual; surely the Northampton KFC bests its non LEED-inspired counterparts. "At what point is being better good enough?" he asks. Horst can't say for sure, but he does know this: "Saying I'm an Olympic athlete doesn't make me one if I'm not in the Olympics. And no building is LEED unless we say it is."

*CORRECTION: The USGBC contacted the reporter after publication to report that its records had not been updated when an interview for this story occurred earlier in the week, and that the Northampton KFC in fact achieved gold certification.

UPDATE: The USGBC has written to tell us that they made a mistake, and the KFC/Taco Bell is indeed certified gold. But there are plenty of projects throwing the term around incorrectly -- like this Chicago high-rise, which advertised itself as LEED-certified before it was even built; here are even more examples of companies including Best Western and Chrysler jumping the LEED gun. "Overzealous marketing teams sometime claim that projects are certified when they've only just registered with LEED," Horst says. "USGBC publishes detailed guidelines to help projects make the right decisions about their marketing, and we follow up on each and every report of misuse."

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Photo: Sarah van SchagenStroll into the newly renovated Starbucks coffeehouse in Seattle's University Village and the décor may feel more familiar than you'd expect.

The menu boards are made from the chalkboards you may have scribbled on at nearby Garfield High School; the shelving is from old bleachers you may have sat upon; the leather accents near the bar are from your old shoes and car seats; and the ash-wood community table that stretches the length of the store and patio (one-third of it is outside) is salvaged from a tree that fell in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood.

It's part of an effort to create a shared sense of community while reducing impact on the planet -- all by sourcing materials locally. But it's no one-off show-off. The University Village store is actually one of three pilot locations (another in Seattle is on the corner of 1st Ave. and Pike St., and a third is in Paris Disney Village in Paris, France) for the company's new global store design strategy.

That strategy, which is part of the brand's Shared Planet initiative, also involves employing local artisans and craftsmen and incorporating reused and recycled materials as much as possible. All of which will help the stores achieve LEED green building certification -- the goal for all new company-owned stores built and renovated beginning in 2010.

Photo: Sarah van Schagen"This green store vision for the company has been happening and building in momentum for several years now," says Jim Hanna, director of environmental impact for Starbucks. "When we ran our carbon footprint, it basically said that 75 percent of our total carbon footprint is operation of our stores ... so if we were really going to have an impact on reducing our footprint, we had to start with the stores."

And this particular store, which reopened to coffeehounds at 6 a.m. this morning, is the company's second busiest globally, which makes it a perfect location for testing the green design concepts. One of those new elements is the lighting: Unhappy with the LED options available on the market, Starbucks partnered with GE to create an LED light fixture that wouldn't be so harsh.

And while the new GE lights are only available to Starbucks right now, they may eventually make it to the mass market. It's a good example of how the company is using its size for good, Hanna says -- not unlike Wal-Mart and other massive global brands that are often villainized, but can create major change in the market when they put their minds to it.

"A lot of our stores have a relatively similar footprint to people's homes," Hanna said. "So if somebody sees a cool LED lighting bank in the store, that's something they can take home and use in their house to reduce their energy usage."

The same could be said for the dual-flush toilets, which are already in use in all of their Australian locations. "It's interesting," says Starbucks Corporate Architect Tony Gale, "people come out of those coffeehouses and that's what they're talking about -- the dual-flush toilets."

In an effort to shepherd this sort of take-home messaging, Starbucks is adding explanatory signage throughout the stores to highlight the sustainable elements.

"Our new design actually gives the community a way to learn a little bit more about it as they discover it and maybe take some of those behaviors back to their homes," says Liz Muller, director of global concept design. "It becomes more of a lab for taking care of our planet."

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