Archives for April 2021

ATLANTA (AP) — It’s not too often that tours of new buildings start with the toilets. But they’re a big part of a different kind of building in Atlanta.

And so, Shan Arora, who oversees Georgia Tech’s Kendeda Building, troops visitors pretty quickly to a ground floor bathroom where the toilet begins to hum, and then foam. There’s no conventional flushing, with the toilets consuming only a teaspoon of water per use. And the waste is composted in digesters in the basement instead of being piped to a treatment plant.

“We say there’s a lot of potty talk in the Kendeda Building,” Arora said.

Georgia Tech is announcing on Thursday — Earth Day — that the building has won certification as the 28th “living building” worldwide. That means the building has proved over a year of operation that it meets the standards of the International Living Future Institute that it does more good for the natural environment than harm.

“Sustainability gets us to a point where we’re not doing as much damage as we are,” Arora said. “But we’ve already done so much damage that we have to get to a point where we’re regenerative or restorative.”

Paid for by a $25 million donation from the Kendeda Fund, the building is, above all, a demonstration project. It’s meant to show that the technology is ready for wider use, especially in a southern environment.

The Kendeda Fund is the private philanthropic arm of Diana Blank, the first wife of Home Depot cofounder Arthur Blank. It also provided $5 million more for programming, to ensure the building gets used to its highest potential.

“Kendeda’s goal was not really to build a building,” said the foundation’s sustainability advisor, Dennis Creech. “Our goal was to be a catalyst for changing how buildings should be designed.”

More than 5,000 people toured the building while it still was under construction. Creech said it will be impossible to track all the “ripples” from the building, but said he knows of two or three buildings now being designed that have been influenced by the Georgia Tech structure.

The International Living Future Institute says a building should be like a flower, giving more than it takes. It prescribes requirements under seven “petals” — place, water, energy, health and happiness, materials, equity and beauty.

It’s the mindset of what’s possible that may be the biggest change.

For example, the building does not have conventional air conditioning. Electricity for cooling is typically the heaviest energy demand in the American South, with long, hot, humid summers. Instead, the building mostly relies on dehumidifying the air, making it more comfortable and less sticky while reusing water that is extracted. Designers also focused on keeping inside and outside air separate, meaning the building has few air leaks.

Finally, there is a piping system that can pump cold water through concrete floors to cool the building if it gets above 78 degrees Fahrenheit (25.6 degrees Celsius). But Arora said that even on the hottest days last summer, the cold-water system never turned on, because the building never got that warm.

Dexter Harper, a Georgia Tech air conditioning mechanic who monitors the building’s systems, said his coworkers were skeptical about the lack of typical air conditioning.

“When I first started, they said ‘You’re going to burn up at 78 degrees in the summer.’ That’s the farthest thing from the truth,” Harper said.

Not surprisingly, there are solar panels. A large solar canopy shades the building while generating more than twice as much electricity as the building uses.

There’s also a focus on excluding materials that designers consider harmful. Even the big glass windows have dimples to warn off birds from accidentally flying into them.

Builders diverted more material from landfills during its construction than new waste it generated, using old tiles from a demolished Georgia Tech building to cover the walls above the humming toilet in the bathroom.

And it means foaming toilets. The building isn’t connected to city sewers and is designed to be independent of the water system, too. The building has gone through a long process to get permitted by the state as its own municipal water system, treating rainwater for drinking. The canopy collects rainwater for the treatment system and sends additional water to be slowly released back into the ground, instead of running off into concrete drains.

Beyond that, the focus on health, happiness and beauty makes the building a magnet for students. On Tuesday, biochemistry doctoral students Jay Haynes and Brooke Rothschild Mancinelli were in the rooftop garden, tending the vegetables. It wasn’t for research, but just for fun.

“Once you know better is possible, how can you look back?” asked Arora.

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Follow Jeff Amy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jeffamy.

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Three years after a malfunctioning storage tank destroyed thousands of frozen eggs and embryos at an Ohio fertility clinic, its former lab director is blaming what he described as bungling staff and administrators who ignored his warnings.

The claims made for the first time in legal filings this month have ignited a flurry of accusations between University Hospitals in Cleveland and its former employee and his attorney.

Andrew Bhatnager, who oversaw the clinic’s fertility tanks, said in an affidavit quickly sealed by a judge that a series of avoidable mistakes led to the tank failure. He also said he was pressured by the hospital’s lawyers to withhold details about what went wrong.

Hospital attorneys called his statements “salacious, misleading and untrue” and have asked a northeastern Ohio court to stop Bhatnager’s lawyer from releasing what it says is confidential information. A judge has scheduled a hearing for Friday to consider the request.

The back and forth erupted in what is one of the last remaining lawsuits against the hospital from the loss of more than 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos in March 2018. That failure and a second one the same day at a fertility clinic in San Francisco were the biggest such losses on record in the U.S., causing centers around the nation to review their procedures.

University Hospitals already has settled with hundreds of couples who had stored their eggs and embryos at the clinic and were devastated because the tank failures meant they might not be able to have their own children. Some had been trying for years to get pregnant, suffered multiple miscarriages or undergone cancer treatments that destroyed their fertility.

Just weeks after the storage tank failure, University Hospitals sent a letter to its patients saying that the tank had been malfunctioning for weeks and that someone had turned off an alarm system that should have alerted staff when its temperature began to rise.

The maker of the tank, which has been a target in other lawsuits, said its initial investigation concluded its equipment didn’t malfunction and that missteps were made at the clinic in suburban Cleveland.

Little else has been released about what happened because all of the settlements with the families have been private and many of the documents filed in the lawsuits have been sealed.

But Bhatnager, one of several hospital employees included in the lawsuits, shared his version of the events this month after a rift developed between him and his former lawyers, who also represented University Hospitals. He accused the hospital of making him a scapegoat and said its attorneys wanted to stop him from telling the truth.

His new attorney publicly filed statements in a Geauga County court. In his affidavit, Bhatnager said he warned hospital administrators during his 18-month tenure that the fertility center was understaffed and had too many unqualified workers.

He said he was was not at the lab when the disaster occurred on March 4, 2018.

The staff, he said, failed to follow his instructions to move the embryos and eggs into another tank while the primary was undergoing maintenance and also didn’t properly fill the tank with liquid nitrogen to maintain the right temperatures.

Bhatnager’s lawyer, Subodh Chandra, has said the public has a right to know what happened.

But attorneys for University Hospitals want Chandra held in contempt of court, saying he publicly disclosed documents that contained confidential attorney-client information in an attempt to influence potential jurors with explosive and unsupported allegations.

“To be clear, this is not about hiding the truth. Rather, this is about making sure that an unbiased jury is responsible for determining the truth — and not news organizations fed by improper and false allegations from an attorney whose client admittedly has ulterior motives,” the hospital’s attorneys said in a court filing.

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TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s prime minister announced on Thursday an ambitious new target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, hours before he was to join a virtual climate summit hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said Japan will strive by 2030 to cut its emissions by 46% from 2013 levels, up from its earlier goal of 26%, to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, a target he announced in October. He said Japan would further try to push the reduction as high as 50%.

“It will not be easy,” Suga said. “In order to achieve the target, we will firmly implement concrete measures, while aiming to create a positive cycle that links the economy and environment and achieve strong growth.”

Japan’s target of no net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 brought it into line with the European Union, which last year set a goal of becoming carbon neutral by the same date. China in September pledged to be carbon neutral by 2060.

Japan, one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters, has been under pressure from environmental groups and European countries to do more than its earlier 26% reduction target. Britain has pledged a 78% reduction by 2035.

Japan initially was to release its new 2030 target in time for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in November in Britain, and Thursday’s announcement was apparently to show its commitment to taking an active role in the global effort as an important U.S. ally.

Experts say Japan is under pressure to play a greater role as part of a multilateral effort led by the United States in environment and climate issues, where China is also expanding its influence.

Suga, during a visit to Washington last week, agreed to cooperate in leading global efforts to reduce carbon emissions by promoting clean energy technologies and implementing the 2015 Paris climate accord.

Progress toward reducing reliance on fossil fuels in Japan has been hindered by the prolonged closures of most of its nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011.

Japan’s current energy plan, set in 2018, calls for 22-24% of its energy to come from renewables, 20-22% from nuclear power and 56% from fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas.

Energy experts are discussing revisions to the plan for 2030 and 2050. The 2050 emissions-free target would require drastic changes and likely prompt calls for more nuclear plant restarts.

About 40% of Japan’s carbon emissions come from power companies, and they must use more renewable sources of energy while stepping up development of technologies using hydrogen, ammonia and other carbon-free resources, experts say.

Suga said he will maximize the use of renewables and other non-carbon power sources, provide support for local decarbonizing efforts and encourage investment.

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