Doug Selby is a rarity among home builders — a man who constantly tries new products and new building techniques. Most builders are reluctant to try anything new, but Selby, who is one of the greenest home builders in Michigan, said that constantly pushing the envelope has helped him to expand his business in a state with one of the worst economies in the U.S.

Can a big house be green? Yes, but a smaller house will always be greener because fewer resources were consumed in its construction and less energy is needed to heat and cool it.

Author Sheri Koones has always made homebuilding accessible to the general reader. With her fifth book, “Prefabulous + Sustainable,” she describes the many ways that prefabricated houses are more environmentally friendly than site-built houses and demystifies green building.

Green is seen as the salvation of the home building industry. New green products at the 2010 Builders Show include Honeywell’s wind turbine that generates electricity at very low wind speed and it can be installed directly on the roof of a wood-framed house. Ipanema decking offers many unusual Brazilian hardwoods and Kebony uses a patented process to make wood biologically inert and resistant to decay and insects.

The green home building community has overlooked an abundant source of reusable building material – international shipping containers. They’re widely available across the entire country, not just in major port cities. Though unconventional, these houses can meet the standards of any residential building code in the U.S. And, as Katherine discovered when visiting architect Adam Kalkin’s new home in Califon, N.J., a house built with containers is really cool!

Economically and environmentally, it’s wise to plan for the end of a building’s useful life at the time it is designed and constructed. Choice of materials and construction techniques can make a big difference in how difficult it is to take apart an old building and re-use the salvage.

Deconstructing an old house produces salvage framing lumber, and sometimes even finish materials, that can be used for building a new house on the same site. If abandoned houses in inner cities are deconstructed, benefits can include job creation; use of salvage by Habitat for Humanity; and cutting down on dumping at landfills.

Home builders increasingly use engineered-wood products — lumber strands shaved off a log, coated with wax and resin, carefully layered, and then heated under pressure. Made with tree species previously left to rot in the forest, these products are stronger than new-growth lumber. They won't warp, crack, or shrink and swell with seasonal change. Also in column: Foundations and floor slabs get greener.

When the lifetime costs of homeownership are calculated, it’s more sensible to build a house with costlier materials that raise the sale price but reduce operating and replacement costs. Dollars should not be the only cost that is weighed. When the environmental cost of materials such as PVC are calculated, many homeowners might opt for more environmentally benign alternatives.

"Use common sense to make sense."  It sounds like Ben Franklin, but the speaker is green-building consultant David Johnston, who often uses this aphorism as a shorthand way of explaining sustainable green-building principles and practices. Although these have been embraced by more and more home builders, there is still much confusion among the public as to what makes a house green.

When you plant a sapling in your backyard that was germinated from the seed of an historic tree, you have a personal connection to history. The saplings from more than 600 such trees are available through the Historic Tree Nursery in Jacksonville, Florida. Some of them are important because they are more than 1,000 years old but most were planted by a famous person or “witnessed” an important event

After years of exhorting readers to make their houses more energy efficient, it was time to take a hard look at my own. The first step was the energy audit. The second was implementing the recommendations. Though minor in extent, these took four weeks to complete instead of the promised two days and cost twice the original estimate. Still we are happy with the results.

Should you replace or refurbish your old wood windows? If you house is at least 40 years old, the wood in your windows may be old growth lumber, which is denser, stronger and more moisture resistant than any of the new growth wood used by today’s window manufacturers. Even if your wood windows are merely old, they may still be worth fixing up, preservationists advise.

The particleboard emissions standard ends a long-running wrangle over health and environmental effects of formaldehyde off-gassing from finished boards. The formaldehyde is in the resin glue that binds wood fibers for structural strength. Trace amounts can be found in every living organism, including humans, and even a room with solid wood furniture will have trace amounts in the air.

Most green products look exactly like the conventional ones they are meant to replace. But occasionally, the green alternative can be more beautiful and exotic, none more so than in wood flooring products. When recycled poplar waste is turned into flooring, the results look like marble; bamboo scrap floors look like African ebony; and recycled palmwood is so unusual looking it could stump a forester.

It’s almost impossible to find upholstery fabric that is soft to the touch, kind to the skin, and also benign to the environment, with no harmful side effects to the end user or to the people who manufacture the fabric and produce the raw materials. Only a few firms in the U.S. sell such fabrics. One is Seattle-based O Ecotextiles.

Manufacturers of countertops with recycled content have upped the ante in looks and technical sophistication. IceStone is made with concrete and recycled glass and features rich purples, reds and greens. Bio-Glass is made with recycled beer and wine bottles; some types of glass appear to be fossilized ferns. Eco is an engineered stone made with a mix of recycled glass, porcelain, and stone scraps and a corn oil-acrylic binder.

There’s no greenest countertop declared yet because no one has undertaken a complete life cycle analysis of the many different ones available. For now, consumers will have to rely on a checklist of factors and make their own determination. They’ll discover that plastic laminate is surprisingly green and their least costly option.

With the help of tradespeople, you can recycle the trees cut to build your new house into flooring or furniture. First, you’ll need a sawyer to cut the trees into rough-cut boards. Then you’ll need the services of a kiln owner who can dry your wood. The boards will need additional millwork and then the last person in this labor chain can turn the boards into flooring.

The annual volume of hardwood cut and trashed by homeowners and municipalities equals about two-thirds the volume cut by commercial loggers. Much of this urban timber is unusable, but with concerted effort, it can be recycled into flooring and furniture. A pilot project in Southeast Michigan is recycling some of the thousands of ash trees that have been removed to prevent the spread of the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle.

With smart-grid technology, a household receives real-time information about its electric use, online or via a digital-display dashboard. Homeowners find it easier to manage energy use, and the two-way communication system helps utilities run their business more efficiently.

Austin architect Peter Pfeiffer’s clients were captivated by the romantic notion of tapping Mother Nature’s sun and wind to generate their own electricity, but solar photovoltaic arrays and wind turbines are still hugely expensive and rarely cost-effective. Wanting to help them understand the cost issues, Pfeiffer devised an “Energy Use Pyramid” based on another pyramid that most people know well – the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Food Guide Pyramid”.

After years of telling readers that Americans can help reduce global warming by using less energy at home, it was time for me to learn how my own house could become more energy efficient. I focused on heating and cooling because together they are the biggest consumers of home energy and, as most houses are not heated or cooled efficiently, they offer the greatest potential for savings.

Older houses lose energy as if they were sieves. Antiquated, non-existent or inadequate energy saving measures can send more than 50 percent of a household’s heating and cooling energy directly to the great outdoors. Most of this energy loss can be captured by plugging air leaks and adding insulation.  

Backup power strategies can provide a reassuring Plan B for eco-minded homeowners concerned about waning power supplies. Pros offer their approaches.

Pilot projects are showing that a digital monitor can help consumers trim energy bills by providing instant feedback on electric use. This handy device can be carried to any room in the house. The monitor does not indicate the power draw of a specific item. But you can easily figure it out by watching the numbers go up and down as you turn a light fixture or television on and off or stand by the refrigerator as it automatically switches on or off.

Every green-building expert touts the wonders of compact fluorescents — they produce the same amount of light as incandescent bulbs with about 75 percent less energy, and they last eight to ten times as long. This sounds fantastic, except that the color of the light given off by compact fluorescents can look horrible. With a brief science lesson and a few tips, however, it’s possible to find bulbs that are aesthetically acceptable.

If you can apply a hard-headed business perspective to a home purchase, you don’t need a deep understanding of environmental issues to make a decision that is more environmentally benign, according to Mathis Wackernagel. He devised the Ecological Footprint, a widely used metric for assessing the impact of human activities on the earth’s resources.

Although home builders have the opportunity to make a huge impact on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming, very few mention it in their sales pitches. They want to avoid debate about a subject that they sense the buying public rejects — and one that could affect their sales.

When parents buy a house, they may sacrifice a lot to get a house in a good school district, even if it means buying a house that barely meets their space needs or involves a commute to work that is hugely inconvenient. But the environment that the kids will inherit one day can also be affected by the parents’ housing choices, and this aspect generally gets short shrift.

For a year, beginning in December 2006, Mahattanites Colin Beavan and his family tried to minimize their enviromental impact. They ate only locally grown food, gave up electricity and motorized transportation, bought only used clothing and toys, and recycled nearly everything, Had the Beavans lived in suburbia, they could have made changes to reduce their environmental impact without affecting their lifestyle at all.

Americans consume nearly as many resources in feeding ourselves as we do in providing our shelter. Ways to cut down on use of “food-related energy” include eating food grown locally with non-fossil-fuel based, organic fertilizers. A calculator from the Global Footprint Network expresses the amount of resources an individual uses in numbers of planets. If everyone in the world lived like most Americans, it would take 5.2 planets to support our needs.

Architect Ed Mazria’s ambitious 2030 Challenge calls for an immediate 50 percent reduction in fossil-fuel-based energy in all new construction and major renovations of existing buildings. He recommends smaller, smarter-designed homes with passive heating and cooling and, when viable, switching out conventional heating, cooling and hot water equipment for those fueled by renewable energy sources.

Is the public connecting the dots between global warming and home energy use? Not so much, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. He thinks communication by environmental groups should put more emphasis on the health and economic benefits of meeting the challenges of climate change.

Offering a detailed explanation of “ecological footprint,” Katherine considers its implications for home buyers and communities, including the planned community of Sonoma Mountain Village in California, where the developer is determined to keep the eco footprint as small as possible.