What Is Green Building?

By Charles Neal

Director - Building Green Council of Central Oregon

What is green building? How can I build green? These types of questions are not infrequent. A green building expert was once asked to “tell me everything you know about green building.” The expert might have responded with ‘what I know could fill a book; do you have the time?’ This would have demonstrated the vast nature of green building.

It would be convenient to have a standard definition for green building. In this way, we would reference the same information, and we could easily agree which house or building is green and which one is not. But that is not to be. In green building as in life, the good things do not come easy. Having struggled to pin down a single definition, a number of variations has been adopted. Instead of classifying green building with the exactitude associated with most definitions, they all focus on principles that contribute to sustainable living.

Let’s review some definitions. Here is one from that most ubiquitous reference source, Wikipedia:

“Green building is the practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings use resources — energy, water, and materials — while reducing building impacts on human health and the environment, through better siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and removal — the complete building life cycle.”

This is a good attempt to define green building. Like others, it gives the reader a general description, but does not offer a threshold to identify when a house is green. In short, it does not say to what degree green building practices must be applied before a structure can legitimately be classified as green. Why is this so important? After all, if I reduce my water and energy usage, is my structure not a green structure? One answer is it depends.

Organizations such as the United States Building Green Council (USGBC), Earth Advantage, and the Green Building Initiative (GBI), have developed methodologies for measuring levels of green and for certifying houses and buildings. The methods are similar to an academic letter grading system in which if you score a designated number of points you are awarded an “A” or a “B.” Certification requirements and points awarded for each green building choice are straightforward. Being green is a holistic process that takes into account life cycle of the structure, and also the building materials. For instance, energy conservation alone is insufficient, if is offset by extravagant use of material.

For the sake of comparison, let’s look at another definition. I retrieved this one from the website of the Atlanta, Georgia Chapter of the USGBC. Green building is:

“To significantly reduce or eliminate the negative impact of buildings on the environment and on the building occupants, green building design and construction practices address: sustainable site planning, safeguarding water and water efficiency, energy efficiency, conservation of materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality.”

Notice that this latter definition parallels the previous example. Most, if not all, green building definitions are similar to the above examples. The proclivity is to espouse the judicious use of resources to reduce our impact on the environment.

In a recent focus group, Jordan Swart, of BRILLIANT Environmental Building Products, alluded to the three “R’s,” i.e., reduce, reuse, and recycle. The three R’s nicely encapsulate the essence of green building, and are easier for the layperson to recall. The three R’s have substance. By using fewer materials we reduce both waste and consumption. The two go hand-in-hand; high consumption, generally speaking, is followed by correspondingly high waste.  

Reuse entails giving old or existing products a new lease on life. Old products are reclaimed and used in innovative ways. I recently spoke with a business owner who sourced bowling lanes from a defunct bowling alley, and reworked them into table tops, counters, and other furnishings. His efforts prevented the lanes from being deposited in a landfill and avoided production of additional raw materials, in this case lumber. In the process, he also made a profit.

The last “R” in advocates recycling materials that is unusable in their current form. A case in point is turning discarded plastic soda bottles into carpets. As with other processes, recycling consumes energy. In deciding which decision is greenest, we should be mindful of what products and practices, yields the greatest overall benefit. 

The three R’s, like every prescription, have a side effect. While they clearly tell us what to do in the building phase, they do not, according to Mr. Swart, account for what occurred in harvesting and production phases. We are obliged to use our initiative, starting in the planning stage, to minimize consumption and waste. Pre- planning requires more energy, but it should not be an impediment.

As this article points out, it is challenging to formulate an exact, hard and fast, or short and sweet definition. As I mentioned earlier, one reason is that green building inclines toward being an all-encompassing concept. Green building will continue to evolve. Structures that achieve today’s highest green building certification will not favorably compare to those with the highest rating available ten years from today. To an extent, the progress of green building will be analogous to the computer industry. Remember when a 7-pound laptop computer with a 20 gigabyte hard drive was a technological tour de force? To be future proof, the definition of green building is bound to remain broad and principle based. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is progress, and progress generally yields greater benefits than drawbacks. So if you have not memorized a detailed definition for green building, or if in a pinch you forget, falling back on the 3 R’s might not be a bad thing either. When all is said and done, remember to go green and improve your life!