What is “Green Building”?
So just what makes a building “Green”? The truth is that the answer depends greatly on your point of view and I think also the surrounding area. Taken to the extreme, one could say that a house is green when it uses only as many resources as it generates for itself and when it is made up solely of highly renewable and sustainably made materials, created locally. How’s that for a high bar? The truth for most of us, is that most buildings can be made greener than they are but as some point, there is a practical and economical aspect to any project that needs to be accounted for. What is important is that prospective buyers or homeowners looking to improve either their energy footprint or seeking more sustainable building materials and practices go into any transaction with the proper information.
I’ve toured many new developments touted as building all “Green, Energy Efficient” homes only to be disappointed when I discovered that the developers and builders felt using a few Energy Star appliances and carpet with some recycled content qualified their homes to be labeled Green and Energy Efficient. When was the last time you saw an appliance that wasn’t Energy Star? It’s possible, but you have to look hard to find them these days.
You don’t have to spend more to make a house more energy efficient with sustainably manufactured materials, you just have to know what you’re doing. There is a saying in the building industry that “The building code represents the cheapest way to build a house legally”. Many builders and tradesmen learn their craft through apprenticeship and hands on training. This usually leads to very competent and skilled workers who have a fair amount of experience before they can be on their own. This also leads unfortunately to a lot of “old school” practices, where people do things one way because “that’s the way I was taught to do it”. I’ll share a story I heard which illustrates this point. A friend of a friend, as the story goes, had this meatloaf recipe which was passed down from her mother. In the final step of the recipe, she would slice off both ends of the meatloaf before putting it into the pan and on into the oven. One day, her mother was over and happened to observe her making the recipe. When she saw her cutting the ends off she asked what she was doing. Her response was simply because that’s how you showed me. Her mother replied that she only cut off the ends because the recipe she was using was always too big for the pans she had available! Too often we forget to question why we do things a certain way.
It is important that we constantly review the why and the how we do things in the building industry. While we don’t want to be too quick to adopt new technology or techniques, it’s important that we constantly educate ourselves on better ways to build a home.
