Whether you’re a construction professional or just building a backyard patio, check out ResourceStLouis.org, a website that fosters sustainable building practices and an online Materials Exchange designed to keep usable construction materials out of landfills. The latter is a great place to find inexpensive, reusable construction materials from demolitions and construction projects, all posted in a searchable database. Here are a few items you could pick up:

• 40 4′ x 8′ sheets of fiber rock drywall for $10 a sheet
• 70 acoustic ceiling tiles for $1 each
• a solid-core metal exterior door for $5.

Kudos to founders David Bertorelli and John Prater of Enterprise Rent-A-Car and the executive board of ReSource St. Louis!

Midwest Construction magazine has named the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles as one of its “Best of 2006” award winning projects in the category of Interior Design/Fitout. Hats off to Walton Construction, the general contractor on the state-of-the-art facility, which was one of only three projects in the St. Louis area to win an award. The Ameristar conference center was completed in September 2006 and includes two ballrooms, five meeting rooms and an executive boardroom providing 19,200 square feet of meeting space.

Kudos to Kwame Building Group of St. Louis for bringing home awards for two of the largest projects in St. Louis history - Busch Stadium and the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport expansion project.

KWAME President Tony Thompson accepted the “Project Achievement Award” award for the Lambert project from the Construction Management Association of America at the CMAA annual conference last month in Tampa.

The $1.059 billion project was managed by the SPK joint venture — a collaboration between Jacobs Engineering (formerly Sverdrup), Parsons Corp. and Kwame Building Group, which led the project team.

KWAME also pulled in two “Best of 2006″ awards from McGraw-Hill’s Midwest Construction magazine, which named the Busch Stadium construction project as “Overall Project of the Year” and the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport expansion project as “Transportation Project of the Year.” Hunt Construction in association with Kwame Building Group served as the design-build contractor on the $270 million Busch Stadium project.

Dr. Patricia D. Galloway, PE predicts in Blogging on ENR that “with continued design of green buildings, most new construction will be based on green- and smart-building technologies. The future may result in many new buildings actually producing more energy that they consume.”

In St. Louis, the U.S. Green Building Council - St. Louis Regional Chapter and AmerenUE have launched the LEED Incentive Grant Program designed to accelerate green building practices, energy conservation and environmental performance in the St. Louis Region. Grants are awarded to encourage the construction of LEED certified green buildings that will serve as examples for future projects. Grants of up to $120,000 are available, and the application deadline is December 31, 2006. Check out the application and criteria at www.earthwayscenter.org.