A Hint of Paradise

GEDS just came back from a trip to Kuala Krai - literally just came back because I'm on a taxi heading back home from the airport.

We'll post something soon on the trip. In the mean time, a snapshot preview of what we thought as one of the most beautiful place on Earth.

Have a good week and a blessed Ramadhan!

TSGBCA 2012

ARCHIDEX is perhaps the biggest event for the architecture community in the country. It assembles professionals from the architecture, interior design and the building industry and industry leaders - providing platform to keep them updated on the developments in the built environment, mingle and network with captains of the industry, besides sourcing for innovative products, designs and services.

ARCHIDEX 2012 was held from 4-7 July at Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. In conjunction with the event, Tropical and Sub-tropical Green Building Alliance Conference (TSGBC) 2012 was held at the same venue. This was the third conference of its kind since October 2009, which was hosted by China Green Building Council.

TSGBCA is an alliance of green building councils (GBC) with shared interests in the environmental characteristics of the tropical and sub-tropical region. The GBC’s in this alliance are China, Singapore, Malaysia, Philipines, India, Indonesia and Australia. This third edition of the TSGBA 2012 conference celebrates the natural tropical environment and its inspiration to truly innovative design for the built environment. The main theme of the event was "Naturally Tropical Truly Innovative".

I was priviliged to be sent by GEDS to participate in this conference. It's an event about green buildings - of course I'm excited about it!

The first speaker of the conference was Ar. Boon Che Wee, Chairman of Green Building Index (GBI) Accreditation Panel. He updated the audience on the latest GBI certification status in Malaysia. There are currently 70 GBI certified buildings in the country. 

GEDS have delivered 2 GBI projects: Puteri Harbour in Nusajaya (GBI RNC Gold) and ASR Padu in Melaka (GBI NREB Certified)!!

Jane Henley, CEO of World Green Building Council, was there as well. She presented on the green building trend developing all around the globe. Malaysia falls under the Asia Pacific Regional Network. LEED is leading all green building certification tools with the largest number of buildings certified. BREEAM, DGBC, SB Tool and Green Star are among the other popular assessment tools.

She also highlighted an interesting point that the purpose of green building certification is different between countries – and sometimes can be very contradictory. For example, South Africa developed their green building industry to create more jobs. Green Mark in Singapore, instead, is to improve efficiency in works and reduce manpower. 

The rest of the main speakers in the conference include the followings:

1. Li Congxiao, Director CSUS Green Building on Green Building Assessment in China
2. Ar Tai Lee Siang on Urban Forestation in Singapore
3. Naning Adiwoso from Indonesia Green Building Council on Networking and Transformation
4. Rod Leaver, CEO of Lend Lease Asia on Green Sense – Cost to Value Mindset Shift
5. Tsou Jin Yeu from University of Hong Kong on Urban Eco-landscape Formation
6. Ken Yeang from TR Hamzah & Yeang on Biomimicry
7. Michael Budig from ETH Centre Singapore on Design of Robotic Fabricated High Rises

This would have been a novel (or a very lengthy blog entry) if I thought I gonna write a review for all speakers. Nevertheless, my personal favourite was the talk given by Professor Tsou Jin Yeu. He talked about GIS Overlap Analysis and its application on sustainable urban development. Perhaps it reached to me more because his works involve surface thermal monitoring on urban scale and that can provide valuable data for any energy modelling geeks, like myself. 

For example, we all know that it's good to have some landscape around a building. But no one knows how much good it actually brings. In typical green building certification process, credits are awarded if we preserve 20-30% of the land area with green landscape. However, it is unclear to what extent does that help us in terms of reducing the heat island impact.

The above presented system, the surface thermal monitoring on urban scale, can tell us that if you preserve 30% of your land area with green landscape, the outdoor temperature can be reduced by 4 degrees Celcius (if my memory served correctly) compared to no landscape area provisioned. This information can help ESD geeks, again such as myself, to strategize our landscape design and its direct contribution to the energy efficiency measures of the building. How cool is that? (I know it's so exciting!)

I shall stop now because it's starting to turn into a technical lecture. Call me up for coffee if you're interested to discuss about it. :)

There are other several separate mini sessions available throughout the conference. I would love to go to them all but that is only possible if I master the art of “Shadow Clone Jutsu” (my apologies to non-manga readers – it just means that I can duplicate myself to be at many places at the same time).

For more information on the conference, you can find at http://www.tsgbc2012.org.my/en/.

I have been to quite a number of green building conferences, seminars, talks in Malaysia (well, in KL mostly). It's encouraging to see more local case studies are coming up compared to the yester years where most stuffs were about overseas information. These local data were presented in the mini sessions, i.e. local GBI case studies, government policies, IEQ solutions for our own local tropical climate.

Although I personally find that the amount of local data is considerably small - we need more local researches! But the future is bright in the green building industry in Malaysia. We hope that more local researches and data shall come up soon in future green building events. 

And GEDS will be there soon - and we'll definitely let you know!

--

NJB

BECOMING A GREEN MEMBER IN FAMILY,

ISN’T SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS EVERYDAY

For more than 100 years, we have been use and produce waste from any types of material through household. BUT, is as easy as making changes to home activities and shopping habits, try these tips to get into green family.

1.  Buy food without polystyrene

Bring your own Tupperware. Polystyrene contains the toxic substances styrene and benzene, causing some toxins to be absorbed into our bloodstream and tissue.

2.  Focus on reduce rather than recycling

You can just use old clothes as wiping cloth rather than buy it.

3.  Find substitute for plastic grocery bag

Bring your own recycle bag which valuable at RM0.99 (giant) during shopping. Keep it in car for everyday use.

4.  Don’t buy mineral water bottle

Bring your own bottle instead of buying mineral bottle. Bottle water cost RM 3,500 times the price of tap water.

5.  Keep your sauce bottle as herbs container

Wash the sauces bottle before use. You can also do decoration to the container.

6.  Remember to recycling material such as food cans

Recycling food cans such as MILO and condensed milk can. Families with baby use a lot of milk cans.

7.  Make shoes box as your make up/cd storage

Give your room make over by reused shoes box as storage for makeup or stationery tools.

8.  Teach your kids about recycling

Yes definitely!!Teach them what type of material can be recycle and what the best is doing the activities.

9.  Don’t delay, start today

The most important is to have commitment to be green family, start today, not tomorrow or day after tomorrow.

10.  Shopping at GREEN market

They committed to encourage customer to go green.

Celebrities that goes green

Celebrities can be a role model as publics follows every tiny gritty detail of their lives. I personally think it is ingrained in most of the human brain that if they do it, then it must be cool and hip for us mere commoners to follow. Yes, celebrities have the power to change the world for a better place. Let see the list of celebrities who has embrace going green and being green.

1.    Jessica Alba

This mother of two has just launch a line of green baby and household product under her company; The Honest Company. The company’s products include designer biodegradable diapers, all-natural wipes, shampoo, baby lotion, laundry detergent, sunscreen, and more. Not only are the baby products safe and eco-friendly, they’re stylish with designs like lollipops and ice-cream on diapers for girls and little skulls-and-crossbones on diapers for boys.

2.    Leonardo Dicaprio

He is a committed environmentalist that drives hybrid cars and has solar panels installed at his house. In 2007, Leonardo wrote and produced a documentary film “The 11^th Hour” which focuses on global warming.

In 1998, he started the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation to raise awareness of environmental issues. The Foundation works on a variety of environmental and humanitarian issues including Wildlife Protection, Forest Preservation, Healthy Oceans, Water Access, Renewable Energy, Disaster Relief and Climate Change.

3.    Rachel McAdams

A big fan of Rachel McAdams, I was pleasantly surprised to find out she helped launch the Green Is Sexy website that offer advice to those looking to live in a more sustainable and eco-friendly manner.

The site is fun and charming in its fresh and light-hearted takes on the issues at hand. As a woman, I find their tips in maximizing the use of make-up helpful. For example, the eyeliner — “once the pencil gets to a certain point, it becomes soft and difficult to sharpen. Instead of tossing it in the trash, try sticking the pencil in the freezer instead. After a couple minutes chilling out, your favorite black eyeliner will be ready for the sharpener and your hot date”.

Another simple tip is by switching your default font to Century Gothic. Apparently it could save you $20 a year in printer ink cartridges. Taken from their website, “Century Gothic uses about 30 percent less ink than Arial.  Considering more than 300 million ink cartridges are thrown away each year, reducing the amount of ink you use is good for the environment and great for your wallet.”

Guess what font am I using right now? ;)

So what are you waiting for? Click http://www.greenissexy.org/ for a dose of friendly advice by Rachel McAdams and her crews.

There are hundreds more environmentalist celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and even Richard Branson just to name a few. Next up, maybe we should look closer to home and look at our own Malaysian celebrities and their eco-achievement. Care to share who they are?