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>> I'm Mark Miller, I'm an architect. I'm founder of Project Frog. We create high-performance, sustainable green buildings for education.
Music The problem with schools today are that over a third of the kids in the United States are educated in portable trailers. These trailers were not designed to be classrooms, yet we're putting kids inside of them. Student performance relates to the environment in a variety of fundamental, but very meaningful ways. Day lighting, glare management, thermal comfort, acoustics, all if they're handled really well can enable students to learn better. And the order of magnitude of that learning is quite significant. It can be as much as the difference between two grades as numerous test studies have shown. What you're seeing today is the finishing touches on the site improvements for the new Crissy Fields Center. This is one of the world's most eco-friendly buildings. It does, really, two major things. One, it does great things for the environment. Its operations uses a quarter of the energy of a conventional building, and inside is a state-of-the-art educational facility, which is focused on using daylight, thermal comfort and a variage of features and conditions to optimize the ability for students to learn and teachers to teach. Well, these buildings are really trying to move the needle on the energy use in the environment. We use a fraction of the waste in our fabrication process, and we generate one-fifth of the amount of waste that's in a conventional construction site. And of that waste, over 80 percent is diverted from landfill. So, we fundamentally use less to create more. That's a big difference and really important.
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