"Buyers wanting to upgrade to a new home but who are concerned about the subsequent tax increase should consider renovating existing homes. These buyers can reduce their environmental footprint and gain substantial long-term tax savings. Sarasota is ripe with renovation opportunities.”

-Grant Castilow

A Passion for Green Building

Natural Awakenings | April 2008

Relatively few people on the planet lay awake at night thinking about the amount of energy imbedded in lumber. Stephen Ellis, co-owner of MyGreenBuildings, does and he wonders what to do about it. “MyGreenBuildings constructs new custom homes as well as rebuilds and retrofits existing residential structures using as many sustainable practices and materials as possible.

Explains Ellis, “The imbedded energy in a stick of lumber that we find in the homes while we are doing retrofits today,” says Ellis, “was probably cut and formed in 1946.” By the time it was installed in the home, the wood was already about 100 years old. It was a substantial piece of wood that once grew
erect and withstood not only the elements, but time, termites and other predatory insects. Harvested in that era, it was no doubt cut down in an ancient forest, dragged out and shipped hundreds of miles, milled into a real 2 x 4, put on a truck to be shipped to the lumber yard where it waited to travel to  Florida on a train. There it was off-loaded and sat on a shelf until it was finally sold and then installed in a home. “Think about all the energy that it took from beginning to end,” advises Ellis. “The existing materials in some of the homes we evaluate for re-building are usually still in great condition, so I want to use them in some way instead of automatically scraping and hauling away all that ‘energy’ to the landfill.

It makes sense that such things occupy Ellis’s mind because, he confesses, “I’ve always had a passion for my business and especially for real estate.” Before the Massachusetts native moved to Florida in 1998, he was already environmentally conscious. After selling his Environmental Waste Solutions business he became a self-admitted real estate junkie, buying, selling and retrofitting Florida homes. In his former life as a CEO of his Massachusetts business, Ellis traveled the world evaluating how Fortune 500 companies dealt with their waste and taught them how to develop better and more profitable ways of handling it. He also taught seminars on how to become a waste management consultant. “My whole career has been about fixing things and making them better,” advises Ellis “and it’s why I have this particular second career that proves green building is the way things should happen. After people start seeing our “killer” green architecture they will really become convinced that they need to build sustainably in an environmentallyfriend way.”

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