When most people hear the term "green building," they probably imagine something like Bank of America's (BoA) soon-to-be-completed Midtown Manhattan headquarters. The skyscraper will have floor-to-ceiling insulating glass walls, automatic light dimming, water recycling, air filtration and on-site power generation. Those green features have helped make the BoA Tower the first skyscraper to win a Platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating, the highest possible such award. They also helped ensure that the tower won't be cheap — the project is estimated to cost about $1 billion. (Read "Building Materials: Cementing the Future.")
The high-tech green features of the BoA Tower certainly look impressive from the outside, but the real guts of green design can be seen farther uptown, in the economically depressed South Bronx. There, the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCo) — a veteran New York nonprofit — has just opened the Intervale Green housing development, a 128-unit apartment building for low-income families. (Watch the video of The Next Big Biofuel.)
Full story: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879595,
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