What Are Green Buildings?
Green buildings incorporate environmentally friendly measures and make efficient use of resources throughout a building’s life cycle.
The concept of green buildings aims to comprehensively minimize negative impacts and maximize positive impacts that a building has on its natural surroundings and its human occupants.
As a holistic approach to planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance, green buildings successfully leverage a site’s natural efficiencies and integrate low-carbon, renewable technologies to meet the building’s energy needs and create a healthy built environment.
Priority areas for green buildings include efficient use of energy, water, and other resources; indoor environmental quality; and impacts on the natural environment.
Buildings—and the supply chains that support them—are responsible for a huge share of global carbon dioxide emissions (also known as greenhouse gases) and for energy, water, and material consumption.
The global construction sector also represents the single largest opportunity for cost-effective, significant improvements in these areas, making it a broad and robust focus of research and development efforts.
A History of Green Buildings
- 1960s: The concept of ecological architecture emerged.
- 1970s Energy Crisis: Accelerated development of renewable energy sources—solar, geothermal, and wind—as well as more energy-efficient buildings.
- 1980: The term “sustainable development” became established, and some developed countries began widely implementing energy-saving building systems.
- 1990: The United Kingdom introduced the world’s first green-building standard, followed by the creation of the U.S. Green Building Council in 1993.
- Late 1990s: The U.S. Green Building Council launched the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system to codify and verify effective green-building practices. Despite its U.S. origins and predominant use there, LEED has become a strong, internationally recognized standard.
- Since the 1990s: Agencies and countries worldwide have adopted their own green-building programs and standards. Regardless of the guiding system, the core concept of green buildings remains universal. It has become a necessary cornerstone in the construction sector and a major focus for academia and industry as they work to address global energy challenges.
Importance and Applications of Green Buildings
- Buildings account for roughly 40 percent of our country’s energy consumption and use 75 percent of its electricity.
- The construction sector is responsible for over a third of global energy-related greenhouse-gas emissions—a share that could rise substantially without further action.
- There are significant opportunities to improve building performance, and growing pressure on our energy resources and environment demands strong investments and efforts to maximize those gains.
Green buildings combine a variety of approaches—practices, technologies, and materials—across all stages of a building’s life cycle. The specific measures applied to a building are tailored to its unique context and work together to optimally reduce its impact on human and natural environments.
Many strategies involve using renewable resources or introducing innovative materials and technologies that enhance resource use. Maximizing the performance of energy, water, and materials is key when designing green buildings.
Examples of Green-Building Strategies
- Renewable Energy Sources: Many green buildings incorporate on-site solar photovoltaics.
- Passive Solar Design: Buildings can be configured—placement of windows, walls, overhangs, and landscaping—to harness cooling shade in summer and solar gain in winter.
- Daylighting: Orienting windows to maximize natural interior light reduces reliance on electric lighting.
- Solar Water Heating: Using solar thermal systems cuts energy costs for hot water.
- Green Roofs: Planting vegetation atop buildings helps manage stormwater, insulate structures, and cool nearby urban air.
- Rain Gardens: Landscape features that filter runoff pollutants, redirect water for beneficial uses, conserve water, and relieve environmental and infrastructure burdens.
Ongoing discoveries and refinements of these and other measures—including whole-building energy-efficiency technologies—continue to inform and improve the standards, codes, and rating systems used by governments, construction professionals, and consumers worldwide. LEED and other global frameworks guide these efforts.
A notable example: LEED certification is now universally recognized as a badge of resource efficiency and performance, with multiple achievement levels. Tens of thousands of LEED-certified buildings operate globally—mostly in major U.S. cities—fueling a green-building industry built around its recognition and continuing to expand internationally.
Benefits of Green Buildings
- Environmental Impact Reduction: Green buildings reduce negative impacts on natural environments by using less water, energy, and other resources; employing renewable energy and eco-friendly materials; and cutting emissions and waste.
- Potential Net-Positive Impact: Some green buildings generate their own energy or increase on-site biodiversity. Of all industries contributing to greenhouse gases, construction holds the greatest potential for significant reductions.
- Economic Benefits: Developers enjoy higher property values thanks to optimized resource use and superior building performance and durability.
- Enhanced Occupant Appeal: High-performing green buildings attract businesses and tenants with their environmental benefits, greater comfort, higher efficiency, reduced waste, and lower operating costs—boosting occupancy rates.
- Job Creation: The thriving green-building industry continues to grow, generating employment opportunities.
- Health and Productivity: Studies show that occupants of green buildings experience improved job performance and better sleep quality.
As the green-building sector matures with stronger policy support, standards, and incentives, the challenge is to keep refining those mechanisms and the construction practices and technologies they represent. Since their inception, green buildings have driven remarkable advances in reducing energy use and environmental impact in construction. Yet opportunities for further improvement remain, and pressures to adapt to global growth and balance green-building economics persist.
To sustain progress and achieve additional gains, innovation is needed in areas including land use, energy and water conservation, materials, indoor-air quality, and construction management.
Maderera Bozovich is an environmentally committed, socially responsible company inviting everyone to join forces in caring for the planet.
Adapted from Pacific Northwest.
