Go green with Earth Month fair and home tour
Happy Earth Month! PCC supports sustainability year-round, but the co-op is celebrating the global observance this year as a stop on the Northwest Green Home Tour featuring sustainable building practices, and with an Earth Month Fair at the Ballard PCC.
The fair — featuring many co-op partners like Tony’s Coffee, Cedar Grove and Washington Farmland Trust — will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. April 26 at the Ballard PCC. Visit for vendor samples, program information and details on how the co-op supports green initiatives.
The Northwest Green Home Tour is a free annual self-guided tour of sustainable and green building projects in the Seattle area. It’ll take place April 26, the same day as the fair, with a bonus “remote site” day April 27 for other green buildings around the region.
This year’s stops also include an architect’s new home and guest house on Mercer Island, an in-progress Phinney Ridge house with a detached backyard cottage, and a West Seattle carriage house remodeled to accommodate multigenerational living. The remote day includes a look at the Rooted Northwest Cohousing project near Arlington, a 240-acre former dairy farm being preserved for regenerative agriculture and habitat as well as homes.
The Living Building Challenge
The Ballard PCC is a tour stop as the world’s first grocery store to receive petal certification through the Living Building Challenge, considered the world’s most rigorous green building standard. The Ballard store’s certification involved thousands of hours over two years reviewing hundreds of building materials and pieces of equipment to find options that met the standard.
Some of those features are out of the public eye, like water-saving dishwashers, efficient LED fixtures and an emphasis on locally produced building materials. Others are easy to see and appreciate, like the art installation by Ballard artist Kyler Martz — a 16-foot-tall octopus and an underwater-themed mural, both also made with LBC-approved materials.
PCC now has four LBC-certified stores: Ballard, Bellevue, Kirkland and West Seattle.
Spotlight on sustainable building design
The annual Green Home tour, organized by the Northwest EcoBuilding Guild, is meant to educate people about green building and hopefully give them ideas about techniques and innovations, said committee chair Jon Kawaguchi. Visitors are often looking for examples of current work by architects or builders who specialize in green building, as well as seeing what breakthroughs they might consider for their own projects or future dreams.
Heat pumps, while no longer cutting edge, are still “something that everyone should be aware of,” Kawaguchi said, with newer advances in using the technology for water heaters and for clothes dryers.
Washington state code is “quite progressive” when it comes to efficiency and high performance, he said, and each 3-year code cycle gets more energy-efficient. Part of the guild’s mission is helping builders become aware of green building techniques that will soon be required as the code becomes stricter. For instance, newer buildings might feature exterior continuous insulation, which makes a more energy-efficient house that costs less to heat and cool by reducing heat loss through the studs.
“We talk a lot about energy efficiency and insulation and efficient mechanical systems and things like that, but the concept of green building expands outwards, and the overarching concern is our environment… so that expands out to things like landscaping and water use,” Kawaguchi said. Elements like rain gardens or drought-tolerant native plantings are other qualities of green building.
Also fitting the definition: Projects that allow aging in place, and/or adding accessory units that add density and alleviate the current housing crisis in the U.S. The carriage house project on this year’s tour, for instance, added a new living unit above a garage, including an elevator and stepless showers.
“We want to reduce the heating and cooling requirements of where we live, and living in smaller houses is part of that,” Kawaguchi said. “There are actually quite a few DADU (detached accessory dwelling unit) projects and multi dwelling unit projects on the tour that speak to the housing shortage issue, and then also living smaller.”
The tickets are free, but the nonprofit encourages donations. Registration is required; those registered will receive a map with addresses of tour stops. More information is online here.