How Green Is Your Green Building

December 19, 2004 – Vol.9 No.39

HOW GREEN IS YOUR GREEN BUILDING?

Designing and constructing buildings requires making thousands of decisions from thousands of choices. Good decision making is crucial and is often based on long-term thinking since a building may stand for decades and changes are expensive.

Conventional buildings are difficult enough to plan for, but what if a green building is to be built? How many more choices, more decisions must be made to make a building environmentally friendly? And, to make matters even more interesting, to what extent will the building be environmentally friendly? How green will it be? A pale shade or a deep forest green?

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification system from the U.S. Green Building Council is a method to define and rate all of the options, thus the decisions that must be made to determine a building’s greenness.

A completed building is certified for its level of energy and environmental friendliness. Architects who design the buildings must pass a LEED qualification process so that they can marry their architectural skills with the new skills that will result in the construction of green buildings.

Apparently LEED qualifications are becoming a must-have for architects. Clients, especially corporate ones, are demanding green buildings. Architectural firms who want their business must be able to provide the expertise. Green buildings are good for corporate image, can be less expensive in the long run to operate and are good for the health and productivity of workers.

Giant Eagle, one of the largest food retailers in the U.S., has announced that it has built the first supermarket in the U.S. to be awarded LEED certification status. The green supermarket built near Akron, Ohio uses 30-percent less energy than a comparable store while half the energy it does use is wind energy purchased from the power grid.

To cut those energy costs the building makes use of extensive skylighting - 50 skylights - combined with sensors to adjust artificial lighting lower on bright sunny days. A white reflective roof with increased insulation underneath cuts air conditioning and heating costs.

Other environmentally friendly enhancements include drought resistant plants - plants that require little watering - that will save nearly 400,000 gallons of water each year. Water that comes from the sky - rain water and snowmelt - is drained into an adjacent marshland.

Visit Giant Eagle at http://www.gianteagle.com/ and the U.S. Green Building Council at http://www.usgbc.org/ .