Captain Planet, Philly Edition
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JEFFREY BEARD
Cities are really sustainable at a certain scale.
MAURICE BAYNARD
Welcome to Drexel’s 10,000 Hours Podcast. Our goal is to mine the stories behind our region’s innovators, inventors, and thought creator. We’ll be talking to experts in subjects from fashion to neuroscience to find out where their passion for work and inspiration for ideas comes from. I’m your host, Maurice Baynard.
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MAURICE
Jeffery Beard is an associate clinical professor at Drexel University’s College of Engineering. His experience in the building industry has informed his current interest in sustainable construction and green building. He’s got opinions on everything from how to make your row home more environmentally friendly to the benefits of the Green New Deal. And we’re excited to hear it.
MAURICE
Dr. Beard, thank you for coming.
JEFFREY
You’re welcome.
MAURICE
So I’m excited. I have a lot of questions for you. So here at the 10,000 Hours, we believe that story drives everything. And so I like asking people about where they started. So where did you grow up? What did your parents do? And did that have any imprinting or what you do today?
JEFFREY
Oh, a huge imprint– huge imprint. I grew up in Southern Maryland where the Potomac River meets the Chesapeake Bay. And my father had come there in 1949. And a little bit later, my mother, they were already married at the time. My parents are actually from Buffalo, New York of all places. And the Lincoln– my middle name is Lincoln. My father’s older brother was a pilot in World War II and died in a training accident. So I was named after my uncle.
MAURICE
That’s amazing–
JEFFREY
That’s where the Lincoln comes from, not from the president, but anyway.
MAURICE
Were there a lot of people in your family in the military?
JEFFREY
Three of the sons were all serving in the war. And my dad is the only one left– a retired engineer. But he’s in a nursing home. But anyway, my parents bringing me to Maryland. My father came out of the war and got out of the war and was a radar engineer– electronics but not high voltage– low voltage–
MAURICE
Low voltage.
JEFFREY
–low voltage engineering. And my mother, an artist, who went to the University of Buffalo for a couple of years, had an associate’s degree, so the engineer and the artist. And my dad gets transferred by a big radio company, Emerson Electric to–
MAURICE
I know it well.
JEFFREY
[? –Patuxent ?] River to run the radar range. It’s one of the five test pilot schools in the world. And so I was born there in Southern Maryland where my dad’s working as an engineer, and my mother, an amateur artist who kept winning prizes at the local–
MAURICE
A little more than average.
JEFFREY
–shows. And, yeah, they finally told her at the county fair where she always took home a blue ribbon that you can’t enter anymore because you’re a professional, not an amateur. [LAUGHS] So the two of them made a good life there. And that’s where I grew up.
MAURICE
Did you go to work with your dad? Did you see what he did on a day-to-day basis?
JEFFREY
As an engineer, you’re always curious about things. And you’re always building. And my mother would sketch something out in her artist approach. And my dad would build it. So when there was an addition to the house, a swimming pool, a sailboat– all those things my dad during his– and, of course, I tagged along and became kind of one of his proteges. He had three sons and a daughter. But [LAUGHS] I was the one who went into building.
MAURICE
So what was your interest as a child and as a young man?
JEFFREY
I actually went away to school. And being from a family of engineers– my older brother’s an aerospace engineer, and my dad being an electronic engineer. I was in my rebellious years and decided I wasn’t going to follow my brother to University of Virginia to engineering school. And I went to a different state. I actually went to Rutgers in New Jersey from Maryland, because my dad said to his son, you need to get out of state to have a different cultural experience– wise man, which we did. And I actually majored in journalism with minors in political science and economics. Rutgers didn’t have an architectural school which I was most interested in at engineering school. But I’m actually not an engineer. I’m an architect by training with a focus on project management.
MAURICE
So you go off to college. There you are at Rutgers majoring in journalism. What did you think at that time you wanted to do with your life?
JEFFREY
In Southern Maryland where I grew up, there weren’t a lot of jobs. If you either were connected with a Navy base and some sort of military technical capacity, or you were in local business, or you were a farmer, because you’re out in rural America. And I was on the academic track in high school, so and then went to college. To be able to afford spending money, my dad, fortunately paid for my tuition as an undergrad. I needed to have a job. So I had friends who worked in construction. So I started at age– I guess 15 or 16– working in construction in the summers.
MAURICE
What kinds of jobs were you doing at 15? Is this just hauling things?
JEFFREY
Just as a laborer. Just does a basic, yeah, with a shovel in your hand. And sometimes, you were allowed to pound a few nails. And [LAUGHS] we eventually got into metal buildings. So that became a little more sophisticated. So you handle spud wrench and weld and–
MAURICE
What kind of things was this construction company building?
JEFFREY
They were an interesting firm, because they had both a truss plant. They built wood trusses and a big old barn that they had adapted. And then they started penalizing houses. So it was an early modular building and then eventually went into light commercial and then projects on the Navy base– building hangars and office buildings, and that sort of thing.
MAURICE
It’s incredible.
JEFFREY
So I was with them maybe from age 15 to– when I graduated from college, I actually went to work for that company when I wasn’t covering local sports as the sports editor at the local paper. So the journalism didn’t pay hardly anything. I loved it. But I realized after three years, four years that I would need to give it up.
MAURICE
How long do you do that?
JEFFREY
Almost four years– 3 and 1/2 years.
MAURICE
So really, really committed.
JEFFREY
Oh, my career could’ve gone a different way. I did that evenings and weekends and worked construction full time as a junior project manager after I got out of college.
MAURICE
So what’s the turning point? At what point did you go, building things and the built-in environment is my real calling?
JEFFREY
Ah, well, it was rather a circuitous route, Maurice. So I married a young woman that I met at Rutgers. She had come back from a junior year abroad in France. So she is a French teacher. And I think she was seeking for a way to get away from, rather, a family that hugged her way too close if you know what I mean. She wanted to find her freedom. So she went with me down to Maryland. And she was encouraging me to work in a city where I could find more opportunity. So I went to work for a Fortune 500 steel company four years after graduating out of Pittsburgh, a big steel company.
MAURICE
Can we name this steel company?
JEFFREY
Well, you have to realize that all the steel companies in the United States went bankrupt in the 1970s, 1980s, except the one down in Texas. I worked for one that went bankrupt called HH Robertson. And HH Robertson is, parts of it are still out and operating, still building building components– formal walls– one of their major products. They had a couples wall division that did glass and aluminum for skyscrapers. I still see buildings around the Washington DC, Baltimore area that I worked on. So but that’s when I started really doing the large scale building.
MAURICE
Tell me about your academic interest now. What are you sharing with students?
JEFFREY
Mostly what I’ve been concentrating in– well, two things. And one is building sustainability, facility, sustainability, green construction. The other is the construction history side, which I bring in quite a lot of design and construction law, of all things. I’m not a lawyer. But I’ve always had a fascination with law.
MAURICE
So I’d love to talk about a green design, and what it means to you, and where you believe it’s going in the world, and how cities can adopt it.
JEFFREY
Huge question. There’s a lot of details underneath that. So green design involves so many different things. It involves everything related to energy and energy cost and energy availability and involves water and everything having to do with water. So we can start with those two, I guess. If you live in a classical city, like Chicago or Philadelphia where there are a lot of people. And we want to convert all of our old infrastructure into something that’s greener, more environmentally friendly. Where do we start? What are our top three things we can do with our new buildings? There are so, so many challenges. But cities are actually– except for the availability of food products, cities are really sustainable at a certain scale. Let’s talk about scale for a second. That’s a really interesting kind of an outcome of our course that we have on sustainable construction. And I have architects, engineers, and construction management students all taking. And, of course, I teach a number of courses in sustainability at the grad level at Drexel. But one of the conclusions that we come to at the end of the class based on a lot of data that the students look at, they say, what is a good concentration? What is a good density for a city? What is sustainable over time? If you look at out in the suburbs where there is a house on two acres, that is really not from a sustainable standpoint, unless they’re growing all their own vegetables.
MAURICE
They’re definitely underconcentrated. Right.
JEFFREY
Underconcentrated. But you look at the high rises that some of the great engineers and architects have recommended, like Frank Lloyd Wright. Let’s have the mile-high building and lots of people in it. On parking lots in between, that is really not sustainable.
So we go through a lot of data. We look at this. And we say, at what point does a building need an elevator? You go to Paris, one of the great cities of the entire world– and there’s lots and lots of housing that was built 400 years ago– 200 years ago– these walkups.
And they cap out at five and six stories, because that’s about the number of flights that–
MAURICE
People want to walk.
JEFFREY
Exactly. You go above that, you start needing an elevator. So the students come up with a surprising mix. It’s not a single number of stories, but it’s a range. And the range is anywhere from four stories to about 20 stories. So the sweet spot you would say is right in between there. 12, 14 stories is really ideal for density. But if you go with these 50-story high rises and one after another, you start overwhelming the space. And people start feeling a little claustrophobic.
MAURICE
So in Philadelphia, we used to have a gentlemen’s agreement not to build buildings larger than William Penn’s hat. And it seems like we got it right despite the fact that it was just an agreement around a single building.
JEFFREY
Most of Philadelphia is at a great scale– great scale, Now, downtown’s yes. And we have this kind of transition up to some really tall buildings if you have a nice skyline now. And I guess I’m not talking about the heavy commercial downtown for New York or Philadelphia, Chicago. But the rest of the city if the concentration’s going to be kept between that 4 and 20, then I think we’ll be much more sustainable for the long haul.
MAURICE
So how did you get first become interested in green construction?
JEFFREY
Actually it was something rather mundane that really caught my attention. Having worked as a project manager for a general contractor– construction manager and always having to price in dumpsters and then seeing what goes in the dumpsters. And how many loads of the dumpster gets taken away from the project. I think me getting into the green area really had to do with really very, very wasteful. We’re throwing a lot of things away, not just the packaging, but some of the products themselves. We’ve ordered all this great structural lumber. And maybe 10% is going right back in the dumpster. And nobody’s getting use out of it. It’s just rotting away. So how can we do better. That really–
MAURICE
Is there something that you have observed that we can do better at even now?
JEFFREY
Oh, definitely– definitely. I think, as we design our buildings, we can try to think through, how long is this building really being designed for? If it’s a public building, it’s 50 or 100 years minimum. So let’s put in really strong good products in that building and include those products in those products things that are very easily recycled. Now, what’s easily recycled? Copper, steel, aluminum, dimensional wood. What is not easily recyclable? Fiberglass insulation, plastic window frames, which are all over the place–
MAURICE
Which are really popular.
JEFFREY
Right. Roof shingles– I mean, there is a lot of things that are just not recyclable at all. They need to go in the landfill. Now, we can design differently so we don’t have to do that from the start.
MAURICE
OK, what are some of the other ideas that you have for individuals who might want to green their own homes? So Philadelphia’s the big city of really old houses– most of them– real houses built in the 1920s. What can we do?
JEFFREY
The good news is that most of these row houses have fairly thick walls because of the construction at that time. The problem is, unless the walls are thick masonry, that there’s not a lot of mass there. So it’s taking off the interior finishes and filling it full of insulation. So you get the good R value. That’s a really great way to start to save energy. And then removing single pane glass windows, putting in double pane or triple pane that seals really well. And you stop the drafts. And there is a somewhat newer technology called EIFS– E-I-F-S– exterior insulation finish systems. So you have an exterior wall that, perhaps, is a little unsightly– get an old wooden wall that keeps flaking off.
You can put the foam panel on top of that and then a stucco mix over it. And because foam is a very good insulator, you can get a much better performance out of your building. And then we talked about roofs. Now, I would say on your roof if you have enough slope, go with a roof that you can really recycle, which would be aluminum or steel, which that’s a 50-year roof if it’s installed correctly.
MAURICE
Are there some cities that you can identify that, with regard to green construction, are doing it really well, like, better than others?
JEFFREY
I guess a couple cities come to mind– the fact that they’re maybe blessed with how they’re located– where they’re located. Boulder, Colorado prides itself on being a green city. And they’ve actually cut down on the amount of parking, trying to force people to go on the perimeter and then walk through. And they really walk away and that walkability is one of the great signifiers of whether you’re in a sustainable community town area or not. You can easily walk within a two mile, two mile radius. Two mile gets a little tough for someone who’s a little bit challenged. But one mile, certainly. And Boulder has really done that. Other cities, like Portland, Oregon, Burlington, Vermont also blessed by being on body of water and with good hiking trails and just good management to try to lessen the energy load and to become more water efficient as an area.
MAURICE
So as you look at our own city, if you were green build tsar, what would be the first thing you would pass?
JEFFREY
As far as Philadelphia being more green, there are so many opportunities here. And the city has a lot of assets already. But to go the extra step, I think Philadelphia, instead of continuing to have gas-fired power plants, a solar farm, a wind farm– I mean, we’re not that far from Delaware. And Delaware Bay, it’s windy down there all the time. Put some wind turbines down there and power Philadelphia that way instead of burning fossil fuels. That would be also the rivers here. Delaware and the Schuylkill are both navigable. The Schuylkill’s navigable to Fairmont Park here, which used to be the water plant. Why not put in some water taxi systems so we can get around? As long as we can go cross Market Street and across, maybe a circulator and connect the two, have an alternative to buses and– I mean, SEPTA’s great, but SEPTA only goes so far.
MAURICE
That’s a great idea.
JEFFREY
You go to Rotterdam in Holland, and it’s just amazing. You come into the airport. You go across the way. There’s the train station– the train station that allows the buses, the bicycles, the cars– everything to come in on the other side of the train station is the canal. It is the most multi-modal place. And Philadelphia has the same natural features. So why can’t we be like Rotterdam? We can.
MAURICE
That’s a fantastic answer. So we’ve all been thinking a lot, both locally and nationally about how we not just green our cities but green the planet. What can we do sort of as a country to move it forward? And so there are things like the Green New Deal that have been proposed by the current Congress slowly making its way.
JEFFREY
I think some of those champions for the Green New Deal are kind of like the canaries and the coal mines saying, we see the danger. If we keep going down the present path–
MAURICE
I was about to say that’s an ominous illusion. Right? Those canaries die.
JEFFREY
Well, the canary can be taken out on the shoulder of the miner if we’re careful about this. But the Green New Deal has real possibilities. Lots of people could be employed. A lot of it has to do with the early adopters. Some of us need incentives. I look at the solar businesses that are all over the place. And I’m a fan of solar businesses. It’s much more prevalent in Germany, which is gloomy, rainy, cloudy a lot of the time. Here, we have a lot more sunshine. Solar could go really, really well in Philadelphia. Well, the problem is twofold. First is that we have a business model where these huge companies are coming in. And we’ll say, we’ll rent you the solar. You can’t own it. We’ll rent it to you. And we’ll take everything off the top and give you, yes, you lower your bills substantially. But you don’t get the full benefit as if a local contractor could put it together. I guess the second issue is with greening is that we need a lot better training on how people can go into this business. One of the things that’s happened not at the general contractor construction manager level, not at the full engineering level.
But it’s happened with the mechanical engineering firms and the mechanical contractors. They had figured out a way to say, if you hire us, we will come to your building– I’m talking about a commercial.
MAURICE
Understood.
JEFFREY
And we will help you operate that building for 20 years, 25 years. But you have to let us retrofit with this high C, or the government rating system for efficient systems. Let us put in new train carrier or Mitsubishi units to heat an air conditioner facility. And as long as you let us manage it, and we’ll give you all the records, then you give us 10, 15% of your savings so that the owner is getting a huge benefit out of that. Now, how can we blow that up? How can we do that for all systems? Right now, we’re only doing it on mechanical.
MAURICE
Dr. Jeffrey Beard, thank you for being on the 10,000 Hours.
JEFFREY
My pleasure, thank you.
MAURICE
Drexel’s 10,000 Hour Podcast is hosted by me, Maurice Baynard. Our producers are Shaun Fitzpatrick and Nathan Barrick. Drexel’s 10,000 Hours Podcast is powered by Drexel University online.
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