Recent Healthy Building Conference - Syracuse

Reducing Waste Through Intelligent Building Product Design

This Wednesday, at the SyracuseCoE Opportunity Exchange at Healthy Buildings 2009, Sharad Mathur of Inscape Corporation noted that population is an increasingly growing problem. For example, today’s modern individuals consume fifty kilograms of meat a year, when they used to consume five kilograms of meat a year, and astronauts can now view two monuments from space: the Great Wall of China, and the landfill in New York City. Society now easily replaces and discards items that are only a few years old, posing a threat for our future.
This was the premise of Mathur’s presentation, “Intelligent Building Product Design” – that we are very wasteful. As vice president of Inscape Corporation, he believes that simply changing cabinet doors, repainting, changing handles, and remodeling office space is much wiser that completely scrapping the old with the new. Mathur and Inscape Corporation advocate that remodeling old products is much better than buying new office space equipment made from a decreasing supply of natural resources. Mathur specifically advocates the mantra, “SAVE THE EARTH,” where SAVE stands for, S- solution centric design, A- architectural interface, V- variable function, and E- environmental design loop. Inscape Corporation itself is a perfect example of the practices they promote, as they recycle paint and practice product integration. The observance of environmental responsibility is more prevalent than ever, and consumers need to realize that going green is not as costly as they might think.
-Darcy Balcarce, HB2009 Ground Reporter, Syracuse Center of Excellence (syracusecoe.org) is a collaborative organization of more than 200 businesses and institutions that creates innovations for sustainable built and urban environments. SyracuseCoE members work onresearch, development, and educational projects relating to clean and renewable energy, indoor environmental quality, and water resources.

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