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Fort Wayne – As Earth Day approaches, it’s time to reflect on saving our environment. One place where reflection is especially appropriate is within the construction industry.
It’s estimated by the federal Department of Energy that U.S. buildings consume 70 percent of all energy and produce 39 percent of all carbon-dioxide emissions. About 40 percent of all raw materials produced go straight to construction, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis.
But things are greening up as the industry learns to reduce, reuse and recycle.
In Fort Wayne, the Northeast Indiana Green Build Coalition in the last three years has accumulated more than six dozen businesses and people with a stake in a greener-built environment.
Now among the area’s resources: green architects, a green project estimator, energy auditors, a building demolition recycler, a construction debris recycling company, several homebuilders who specialize in efficient Energy Star homes, a handful of certified green professionals credentialed by the National Home Builders Association, a green remodeler, a major geothermal-energy manufacturer and installers of solar and wind energy equipment.
Here are some area “ecopreneurs” who have a stake in the future of green building:
Jerry Vandeveer, 60, just laughs when he’s told he’s never met a hunk of wood he didn’t like.
For that matter, he’s rarely met a claw-foot tub, a pair of plate-glass doors, a fancy fireplace surround or a masonry window arch that he could resist.
At The Wood Shack, 444 W. Baker St., Vandeveer and his wife, Linda, 58, have been reselling salvaged building parts for more than two decades.
The sign in front of the business says it all: “We recycle old homes.”
The couple got into the business by way of antiques. They would buy old furniture at auctions and yard sales, strip it, refinish it and resell it.
But as old homes were increasingly torn down in downtown Fort Wayne about 20 years ago, Jerry Vandeveer began making deals with demolishers to pull out woodwork, such as pocket doors, stairways, porch railings and trim. He then resold the pieces to those restoring other old homes.
“Seeing it go to a landfill – it seemed like such a waste to us,” Linda Vandeveer says.
In the past decade or so, people began asking for pieces of old woodwork and cabinetry to repurpose into furniture and décor. One well-known project that used pieces of Vandeveer’s collection is Joseph Decuis restaurant in Roanoke, where some old pocket doors were reworked into a decidedly upscale bar, their set-in brass handles intact.
Lately, Jerry Vandeveer has been traveling to Chicago to salvage wood from turn-of-the-last century apartment buildings now being torn down. He also has been rescuing architectural details from local properties.
Also this year, he saved the front door from the house at 216 E. Jefferson Blvd. It will become part of J.K. O’Donnell’s restaurant, 121 W. Wayne St.
In back of the shop stands the steeple of the former Emmaus Lutheran Church at 2320 Broadway in Fort Wayne. When the church was turned into a charter school, most religious accoutrements had to go, he says.
But the zinc-plated topper, which weighs a literal ton, is off to grace a Fort Wayne garden as a gazebo.
“To some people, say a retired person, recycling newspapers is being green. But to me, … if I can save something like this and people can see it and use it for the rest of their life, to me, that’s green.”
When it comes to houses, what’s the greenest thing you can do?
Live in an existing home rather than build a new one, says Sam Eagleson, co-owner of Evergreen Remodeling in Fort Wayne.
That’s because an existing home has a lot of what’s known as embodied energy. That’s the energy that was consumed by all of the processes associated with the production of a building, from clearing land to creating infrastructure, acquiring natural resources through mining or logging, manufacturing building supplies and appliances, and delivering products to market.
Older homes tend to be inefficient consumers of energy. But building a new home consumes even more energy and resources. So if an inefficient existing building with a lot of embodied energy can be made to use less energy, everybody wins, Eagleson says.
That’s one reason Eagleson, 30, and his father, Ross Eagleson, 57, have retooled the remodeling contracting business they own in the last two years to incorporate green elements.
“There isn’t a huge Fort Wayne market for heavy green remodeling like solar panels, but we can pretty much add green aspects to any project we do,” Sam Eagleson says.
Dual-flush toilets, low-flow faucets and showerheads, high-efficiency lighting and low- or zero-VOC paints are all among features offered. VOC stands for volatile organic compounds, environmentally unfriendly chemicals some paints emit.
“We’re also starting to get into using recycled drywall and composite decking, and we’re getting to the point where we can say 25 (percent) to 30 percent of our debris is recycled,” Sam Eagleson says.
Eagleson became interested in green remodeling when he saw the industry going in that direction while he was enrolled in Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne’s construction engineering program.
He’s already seen results at Hope Farm, a horse farm near Roanoke, where Evergreen Remodeling recently redid a stable and riding arena. Increased insulation, water-conserving appliances and high-efficiency lighting were among the green features.
“We were able to completely salvage the existing structure, and we turned it from a rat-infested building to a completely modern facility,” he said. “We really turned that place around.”
Steve Park got in on the ground floor of the green architecture movement.
The Fort Wayne architect attended the first national conference of the U.S. Green Building Council in 2002 and came back energized.
“It was the best conference I’ve ever been to,” says the 53-year-old graduate of Ball State University’s environmental design program. “You learned a massive amount in a short amount of time.”
Now Park is just as energized about launching his own green architecture practice, after serving as a Moake Park Group partner for more than two decades.
Park says he’s always included green elements in his building designs. But he hopes to develop his new firm, Basic Elements Design, as a green-integrated design firm.
By that, he means a firm that integrates energy efficiency and sustainable materials and other green factors from the outset of design work.
“That’s one of the big issues in building today,” he says. “I think it’s something that architects have done poorly in the past – they’ve focused on aesthetics or function because energy was cheap and we could afford to waste it.”
Park is working on retrofitting a former State Developmental Center building into a green-construction technology lab for students at IPFW.
He’s just completed the Wabash County Solid Waste Management District headquarters in Wabash.
The headquarters has two features of which he’s proud. He installed orienting windows to take advantage of natural light the outdoors can be seen from anywhere in the main part of the building, and a close-the-loop effort in which glass recycled from Wabash County is used in the building as glass tiles.
Heated by a geothermal heat pump system, the building has flooring from bamboo, a renewable resource, and kirei board paneling, which is made of compressed corn and soybean stalks. Salvaged timber was turned into a canopy.
Park says he sometimes worries about how the green building movement is going. As it’s been popularized, there have been more calls for standardization, he says, leading to a “rather bureaucratic” points system. Too many architects are going for points that can earn a building an honor but might be counterproductive if the features don’t produce actual green benefits, he says.
“What the process is supposed to be about is to design a building specifically for its use and site and doing what’s right environmentally,” he says. “It sounds like something everybody should do, but I’ve seen few do it well.”
Rob Talbott is staking his future on alternative energy.
His company, SolarWind Energy Corp. of Kendallville, is a distributor and certified installer for Skystream wind turbines for residential and small-business use.
The nine-month-old company recently installed a turbine for a trade show in Nevada and another on a farm in Iowa. Talbott is working toward the company’s first local installation at a Fremont farm.
SolarWind is the only distributor in northeast Indiana for Skystream turbines, which, unlike some others, are made in the United States with U.S.-made parts, Talbott says. The brand is sold by Southwest Windpower of Flagstaff, Ariz.
SolarWind is also working with Indiana legislators to enable development of wind power and other renewable-energy sources in the state, Talbott says.
The company also plans to work with the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union to offer wind and solar installation training to apprentices.
Talbott, 40, says although SolarWind remains a full-service electrical contracting business, he’s excited about helping people go off-grid, or generate enough electricity to be self-sufficient.
“(President) Obama has made the statement that by 2012, we’re supposed to be 15 percent alternative-energy compliant, and by 2025 he wants us to be 30 percent, so to meet those standards, we’re going to have to change a lot of things,” he says.
“There’s going to have to be a lot of wind and solar installed to achieve that in the state of Indiana, and there are going to have to be people to do it.
“In three years, I would like to be routinely doing PV (photovoltaic solar) and wind installations, and I would like to see these put up at schools and vocational centers and colleges so kids could see them and learn what we should be doing in the future.
“I’m concerned about what my children and grandchildren are going to have to deal with with the environment.”
