Sustainability

Sustainability Committee

Chair: Brian Ashman

Focus is still on heating/insulating as Winter Heating is most of MSC's CO2 footprint, yet Sustainability initiated discussion with architects about addressing Summer heat and indoor air quality as well.  We still recommend using window films, but with our first DOE compliant window (U=0.20) we can observe the benefits of better windows. DOE approved LowE storm windows with window refurbishment should add Winter comfort to Ekklessia living & Dining Rooms, while realizing heating savings. The challenge is competition for volunteer and paid craftsmen/consultant time among various city requests, E-House Windows and efforts to accommodate the totality of Keda house needs in a Keda Roof Project that is urgent and top priority. Doing it wrong would have lasting financial and housing quality impacts for MSC.

Sustainability Committee needs to get back to strategic planning meetings, and purchase research task forces. INTEP is ready to help when residents are ready to participate. For now effort focuses on the Keda Roof Project as a case study hoping to achieve all the benefits envisioned by the L-Hús project with the assistance of architects to avoid difficulties and short comings of the shoestring L-Hús Project.

How we do Maintenance matters. Maintenance needs to compile the bedroom by bedroom priority list, to schedule improvements at a routine pace.  Sustainability volunteers had their time increasingly drained away responding to maintenance crises.  While this saved MSC substantial $$$ relative to options offered by newer Management Contracts, it overextended a few individuals while not inspiring the next group of volunteers. Sustainability Leaders are concerned to not see progress on Keda roof plans, and feel attempting leadership toward implementation of that basic maintenance requirement could be counter productive unless a clear time horizon for completion is defined ASAP. Still ignoring underlying causes of failure results in many crises MSC faces. Transitioning from intense reactive Maintenance to deep proactive maintenance needs consideration.

Keda Roof repair is a critical Major Project need.  Finding a contractor to actually stop leak in flat E-roof is still desperately needed. Most flat roof repairs have been insufficient within 5 years or work for MSC. Repairing castle bathroom window was a simple fix, but without exhaust ventilation and in our tightest home making it leak proof has no net benefit.  The chimney repair to castle was a financial waste because it is obsolete once any decent heating system goes in and it did not reduce the leak, but we were not prepared to recommend a particular heating bid. At the minimal standards Castle is maintained to, Sustainability did show Castle to be revenue positive, but the cost effectiveness of investing more into Castle vs replacing it needs analysis.

Main & Castle House sewers and E+C water distribution need implementation plans with bids.  Sustainability Committee never offered to provide such basic infrastructure services. Yet combining such major excavation projects can let cost savings go into related remodel enhancements to basement bathrooms...

What Sustainability Committee offers is assessments of what improvements have greatest chance of both improving quality of resident life, and reducing overall long term financial & environmental costs.

Building Recommendations So far.

A resolution to require Board of Directors approval for management to purchase or reimburse non Energy Star compliant appliances, or lights passed.  The process of estimating how much energy, and money, are wasted by delaying Lighting upgrades, and appliance upgrades continues.  (See Refrigerators, Lights). Here's an article about Energy Star refrigerators.  CEE list of the best refrigerators.  Other CEE resources.  These device swaps are the easiest opportunities to verify and implement, but the building heating (and if we had it building cooling) clearly offer the greatest opportunities for savings. After RealEstate taxes, gas and electric bills remain MSC's largest single expenses. The trouble is that the greatest savings require improving the systemic efficiency of heat retention and exclusion in Winter & Summer, and most contractors won't go near trying to guaranty any significant performance improvement. Sustainability investigations find so many things that can go wrong, that it recommend investing in experts with proven success rates .

http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Conservation/Insulation/Colorado.pdf

It'd be great if someone had time to asses combining excavations for water distribution with those for foundation insulation and for ground source heat pumps. The Passive House approach makes sense for MSC because it results in lower per year lifecycle costs if one is building a new home.  Code compliance hassles are unlikely in a structure that exceeds other international codes for safety, durability, air quality... However, recovering value from existing structures to make a passive house building can exceed costs of new construction.  Fundamentally, MSC must articulate enduring community values to determine the right way forward.

Accumulating reserves is necessary, but insufficient to get the results we want.  We must choose which better future, to determine the best route to get there.

The Passiv Haus Architect is candid that his expertise is not optimal for cost effectively extending the life of deteriorated 100+ year old buildings with any past rot... It is beyond ironic that only our oldest & leakiest building appeared both rot free and structurally sound in areas vital to incorporation in a Pasiv House.  Investing in ground source heat pumps and alternative energy to heat, cool, and power a less efficient existing structure can avert the great cost and waste of building from scratch and other architects and engineers lead in those areas on tight budgets.  MSC may innovate and adopt smart technology early, but funding experimental new design approaches is not in any mission proposed for MSC in half a decade.

Little House roof went conventional as apposed to passive. We avoided engineer and architect expenses to shoot for a possible 10yr payback on a new heating system, and getting a light colored 50yr finish warrantied steal roof and going after the most obvious air leakage, maintenance, and liability investments at minimum cost.  Badger Heating and others suggested that simply removing the chimney and its associated air leaks could reduce heat loss from air leakage by %15.  Sunnyday and others noted how 6+ inches of dense cellulose blocks air flow and fire progress more completely than any fiberglass insulation.  Metro Heating concurred with residents that the previous furnace was grossly oversized resulting in inefficiency and in brief heat events followed by much longer cold periods.  Cold air could not return to the furnace fast enough and so more hot are escaped the house.  Ramy of Sunnyday recommended A-craft to refurbish existing window sashes so we could DIY filling cavities formally used for window weights, and installing tighter plastic tracks in our leakiest windows.  Green Home Drs recommended Larson panel window inserts to tighten existing single pane windows, but we did not find time to DIY that do to longer roof install time than anticipated. We merely increased the tightness of the leakiest envelope components of the leakiest parts of the house, and have yet to evaluate the remaining heat loss issues.  This is sad because we want results to inform decisions of how to approach the Keda Roof and unimproved MSC windows.

Volunteer Opportunities:

Volunteers are frequently needed to harvest and deliver healthy fruits for crises food shelves

      http://fruitsofthecity.volunteerhub.com/events/index

We should sell more excess items to incoming students as half or below retail costs. Proper storage accounting could let us have and pass along better quality used stuff.

Aug 27-Sept 7 we need volunteers to assist safe parking during the State Fair

Sept 26 = Community Cleanup Day -- We seek 3 more volunteers

Saint Anthony Park has a group focused on improving building efficiency. See here

We are conscious of broader sustainability concerns.

This committee supports a resolution to use permeable concrete, or permeable pavers over the central traffic areas of our parking lots when they are redone.  We discourage raised continuous curbs that channel water flow.  We seek a plan to infiltrate all water possible on site, ideally in rain-gardens.  We will be concerned if paving projects proceed without proper planning, proper drainage, proper grading, and proper foundations for maintenance friendly, long lasting, quality parking areas.  We do not support asphalt if it is not confined by concrete borders.  Most the cost of doing the parking lot wrong, will not be apparent in the initial work and material costs.  Grant funds are available for rain gardens, and porous paver, only if we submit an articulate plan.

Efforts to remove invasive exotic trees, and improve garden soils continue.  Proper rain water collection awaits proper gutters, but a small demonstration effort was made to ensure melt water runs off rather than freezes on the path from M-House to the alley. This worked for years but has mostly been filled by dirt carried from soil runoff onto the sidewalk between L & M which would require days of digging to prevent.

Such initiatives progress slowly by labor at no cost to MSC.  MSC doesn't get any monetary value out of beneficial things like reducing parking lot runoff, so a dedicated Sustainability Fund was created to pay for such things.  Members have contributed directly by donations of both money and fundraising hours.  That is a topic in itself.

Intelligent light controls can address Light Pollution and actually deter theft far more than static lighting, but first this committee seeks to address ignorance regarding harm night lights do.  For information see the Dark Sky Initiative.  Brian Summarized the types of pollution sustainability efforts seek to address.  LED's can offer night lighting that does not disrupt circadian rhythms, but as of March 2016 we've not found such an affordable and efficient night lighting option.  Thus delay is our friend.

We serve sustainability goals most effectively by helping to better serve MSC's mission.

Sustainability Committee contributes deliberative plans to achieve better results in both financial and environmental terms. Plans are vetted for return on investment.  This is not for profit, but to provide the best value to our members regardless of their environmental views.

Many of the vision ideas expressed here are pursued as they relate to other MSC priorities that are more central to the plans of the BOD and the habits of our Managers.  Still, the forethought will soon show dividends.  First, in a stabilization of our energy bills, and later in indirect effects that lower maintenance landscaping has on the formation of sheet ice hazards.  If we can quantify realized savings, this may help to speed future saving initiatives rather than to merely see money diverted to new waste.  The final step will be to raise awareness of how much MSC saves via sustainable practices, empower residents to take pride in how lightly their lodging impacts the earth (relative to conventional single family homes in the USA), and try to raise consensus for remaining green initiatives that would not pay for themselves before honestly advocating them to MSC's Board of Directors strictly on how much residents value the change.

This committee seeks to make MSC among the cheapest and most sustainable student and cooperative housing options.  Rather than buy the appearance of sustainability with high rent, or live in substandard housing to keep rent low, this cooperative seeks to leverage member talent to innovate and to demonstrate the full potential value of cooperative decision making.

This demands a collaborative process to redesign our homes.

We talk about specific design standards like Passive House, but whatever we choose will be a balance among our values.

Passive House is an objective standard with tangible benefits.  The active ventilation required in a passive house maintains healthier indoor air than typical in actively heated and cooled buildings. Achieving international Passive House standards (PHI) in our deteriorated 110+ year old buildings makes no economic sense for us, yet the consideration process will still result in better choices and results. We need to clarify how many years we can extend the service of each building, and how obsolete each can be before the needs of students are not being met. Replacement of all but the oldest building appears inevitable, and could destroy our membership if it were to occur simultaneously.

Achieving one Passive House, or a partially passive house, would express our environmental considerations in an unmistakable way.  Its value will be obvious when it attracts people to our cooperative, but it can already be seen when it motivates members to pursue this meaningful goal. A long term plan that announces our intent and a schedule to the city and potential contractors becomes a collaborative process to benefit everyone and can assure the city that we desire to live in quality housing, that is fire safe, handicap accessible, and ecologically wise.

If you want to know more about this, you will need to chat with Sustainability members because there are simply too many details and aspects to planning.

SustainMSC@mail.com