"I am hearing more and more about 'green building' these days, and wonder how much of it is real versus fiction. Should I care if a house I buy or place I work is 'green'?"
Barbara from Chicago
To answer the question, I want to provide a bit of history. The present-day, green building movement started in the late seventies in America as a response to the energy crises of that decade. Increased automobile use, skyscraper proliferation, availability of cheap energy, and modernist architecture changed the performance of buildings and the locating of buildings such that we vastly increased our reliance on fossil fuels, with fossil fuel use tripling between 1950 and 1975 while population only increased by forty percent. As the sources of some of those fuels became unstable, and the damage caused by them more apparent, businesses and the federal government began looking for solutions for how to fix the situation.
As industry leaders and policy makers sought solutions, the push for better energy usage in buildings lead to the creation of the building commissioning industry. Commissioning focuses on providing existing building "tune-ups", much the same way we do for automobiles, or providing quality control during construction, much the same way we have quality control in manufacturing. Commissioning seeks to find and eliminate waste in the building construction and operation process, without sacrificing the services needed in the building.
Even with the evolving approach to efficiency, we still had a gaping hole in the initial design or renovation of buildings. Finding issues that affect energy usage by even fifteen to twenty percent sounds great, but what about buildings that could use up to twice or three times some of their predecessors? The industry realized that pushing for more efficient buildings and better built buildings was only the start. Add to this the push for ways to address water pollution, ozone depletion, sick-building syndrome, soil depletion, and gridlock, and you realize that a quality control solution would not suffice.
In the late eighties to early nineties, as a population raised on Earth Day, Smokey Bear, and Three Mile Island grew into consumers, businesses started to understand that they could make money catering to the environmental set. This lead to labeling or products as "eco-friendly" or "green" or "environmentally friendly/safe". As marketing professionals got a hold of the latest trend, and companies failed to keep up with the promises, consumers became confused. Especially in the area of building construction, where so many different aspects of environmental living come together, it became difficult to discern reality from fantasy.
In 1993, a group of individuals from many areas of the construction industry came together to address these issues of greenwashing, and to potentially develop a standard by which designers and owners could recognize buildings as "green" with specific, industry-driven standards on which everyone could agree. This lead to the creation of the US Green Building Council (USGBC; not a government agency, but an industry organization that later became a not-for-profit corporation). and the development of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. Although several successors have come since the launching of LEED in 1998 (Green Globes, BREEAM, CASBEE, GBTool), all have some sort of checklist format that seeks to balance out some "must have" strategies with optional strategies to build a point system that measures the "greenness" of the building. This point system structure lends itself to competition and ease of marketing (especially with the USGBC's choice of Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum as the increasing ranks of building "greenness"). Because of this market/competition driven nature of all these systems, the performance improvement has reached a wider audience of listeners, but questions remain about how quickly the market is being transformed to create lasting change.
With that as a preface, the answer to your question is quite short....yes. You should look to live and work in green buildings, or make the home you live in green, or demand that your company's owners implement green practices. The current list of green building rating and scoring systems all focus almost exclusively on "state of the shelf" technology...meaning that in order to meet any criteria of performance, a designer does not have to create something new, experimental or untested. Since tested technologies and strategies form the core of these systems, asking for their requirements to be met should not put undue burden on you as a homeowner or on a business. This is not to say that you or a business owner can or should do ALL of the options available....but meeting some very basic requirements should not fall outside the realm of the possible. For example:
1. Eliminating all materials in the building that off-gas and release volatile organic compounds into the air.
2. Purchasing or building structures in neighborhoods with ready access to basic goods and services.
3. Encouraging, through design or operation, the use of public transportation and walking/biking.
4. Providing recycling infrastructure throughout the facility.
5. Discouraging smoking or release of harmful emissions.
6. Providing documented visual, thermal, and ventilation comfort throughout the building.
7. Increasing access to the outdoors from occupants.
8. Reducing the amount of material needed to create a building without reducing services.
Business and government has sought to balance how much of these rating systems reflect "must do" strategies versus "should do". Until more buildings are built green, so that data can be gathered on health benefits (if any truly exist), productivity, economic and environmental impact, it will be difficult to quantify if green buildings have added value. Several studies have attempted to make that connection, but more are needed. Until that point, we are left with some common sense. The fewer resources we can use, the fewer chemicals that get into our buildings (and then into us!), the more comfortable we can make buildings, and the better choices we make in where to build, the more common sense we end up using and the better our buildings are to us that occupy them, and those who do not but are impacted by our choices.
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