With buildings accounting for 40 percent of total energy use, 70 percent of electricity, 60 percent of raw materials, and 12 percent of potable water use there has never been a greater need for high performing buildings. Such buildings do more with less, have small ecological footprints, and create a healthy indoor environment for the user. They meet users’ functional and aesthetic needs, while scoring gains in energy efficiency, materials use and sourcing, water efficiency, carbon footprint, construction practices, site development, and indoor air quality. High performance buildings prove their worth by increasing user satisfaction, reducing their operating costs, and commanding higher market value.
There are many standards setting the bar for what we call a high performance building.
Rating systems, such as the United States Green Building Council’s
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Program, England’s
BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method) Program, and Australia’s
GreenStar Program, work by awarding “points” for green building practices. Code-based programs, such as the
ASHRAE 189.1 standard and the
International Green Construction Code (IGCC), establish minimum requirements for efficiency and best management practices. Finally, there are performance based programs, such as the
Living Building Challenge, that look only at end results.
In a country where we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors, it is imperative that we design and build our buildings to the highest standards. And, since our buildings consume the most energy of any sector (and account for nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions), our ability to build and re-build high performance buildings will determine our capability to enhance our worker productivity, and our quality of life, decrease our dependence on fossil fuels, and create a more sustainable future for our cities.
