Instead, roadside grass swales will help the sand filtration basins capture and clean the first pollutant-carrying inch of rainfall. She says that reducing construction waste and buying fewer new products are among the more effective ways to help the environment. Standardizing specifications, for example, makes building items like doors and hardware more interchangeable. Vandenbelt prefers demountable partitions over traditional drywall assemblies. Shop-finished demountable partitions reduce airborne contaminants during construction and leave a clean job site.
Demountable partitions are reusable and usually contain recycled materials.
She also salvages demolition materials like recessed can lights, millwork, and wood doors through a local supplier of used building materials. Developers are turning farmland into housing to meet demand from houseseekers priced out of San Francisco and Los Angeles markets and from big families still common among Hispanic and Southeast Asian immigrant populations in the Valley. Small farmers, not giant agribusinesses, are selling their few dozen acres to developers. Produce from the Central Valley fills supermarkets from New York to Anchorage. Alliances among farmers, conservationists, and politicians to protect the farmland acknowledge inevitable growth and development in the Valley.