Building, Planning, & Engineering

• Building & Planning
  Forms and Handouts

• Green Building &
  Your Project

• Green Building:
  Did You Know?

• Carol's Green Feature

• Town Requirements
  for Selling Property

• Public Works

• Building Permit FAQs

• Planning FAQs

• The average American consumes about 86 gallons of water per day in their activities (showering, washing clothes and dishes, toilet flushing, etc.). Installing a low-flush toilet can save about 2 to 5 gallons of water per flush.
  
  
• Refrigerators consume the most energy of all residential appliances (14% of the total residential power use as reported in 2001).
  
  
• Food and yard waste make up about 30% of US landfill garbage.
  
• Nearly 60% of all solid waste produced in the US is compostable material.
  
• Nearly 80% of Portola Valley's and Woodside's garbage undergoes composting by Greenwaste Recovery, Inc. To learn more about composting in your backyard, check out www.recycleworks.org.
  
  
• Americans spend about 90% of their time indoors.
  
  
• Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC's) are potentially harmful gases. In your home, VOC's are produced by the drying of conventional paints, stains, and adhesives as well as the off-gassing of glues and chemical coatings in the materials that are installed in your home (such as carpet, particleboard, and plywood). This indoor air pollution can be reduced by using low-and no-VOC products, avoiding wood particleboard in cabinetry and furniture, and looking for carpets that have the Carpet & Rug Institute's Green Label that displays the product's emission levels.
  
  
• Cleaning/changing your furnace filter is one of th easiest things you can do to increase the efficiency and prolong the life of your heating system. Pleated-type filters use a dense mesh material to trap particles and are more effective than disposable fiberglass filters or washable electrostatic filters. The pleats act to increase filtering surface area, thereby more effecitvely eliminating allergens like pollen and mold. The efficiency of pleated filters in trapping particles is 30-50% vs. fiberglass, which is less than 15% efficient.
  
  

Please review previous editions of "Green Building and Your Project...Did You Know?"