Green Buildings Are All The Rage

The sustainability movement has been paired with construction practices to create a "green building" boom. Essentially, green buildings may: 1) make more sustainable use of natural resources for building materials, 2) be more are energy-efficient, 3) incorporate renewable energy sources such as solar panels, 4) be aesthetically integrated with the environment, and/or 5) feature "natural" aesthetics such as sunlight or running water indoors. Advantages can include lower environmental impacts, lower operations cost, and happier/healthier/more productive inhabitants. In the U.S., the generally-accepted certification for green buildings is the LEED Green Building Rating System™, where LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

I was only vaguely aware of this movement until I attended Andy Savitz's book launch at the new Boston Headquarters of Genzyme, which is considered a model of green building practices in a commercial office building. After that, I noticed that a fellow 1Bloc writer chose to explore the idea of Green Affordable Housing for her recent article.

Then, it was just everywhere. Was I just more attuned, or was this phenomenon really passing some sort of tipping point? I can't be sure, but in late December I learned that Boston planned to amend building codes to require all large-scale private construction to meet "green" standards, and that several other cities are making similar changes in legislation.

Around the same time, the business magazine Barron's quite appropriately announced that green buildings were going mainstream (see "As Green as the Grass Outside" from the 12/25/06 issue). The article reports that, according to The Green Building Council (which runs LEED), 5% of all new U.S. commercial from 2006 construction will be LEED-certified, if the certifiers can ever dig themselves out of their vast backlog of requests.

Finally, a couple of days ago, I received an email about a new website called Rate It Green (www.rateitgreen.com) which allows individuals and professionals to share ideas about green building practices and products.

What a huge surge of news about one topic! I'm sure there's plenty more, but that should provide an introduction if you're not familiar with the topic, and some useful links if you need to know more.