Green Naturally

Sustainable or “green” building practices can reduce the tremendous impact that building design, construction and maintenance has on both people and nature. According to the U.S. Department of Energy's Center for Sustainable Development, buildings consume 40% of the world's total energy, 25% of its wood harvest and 16% of its water. The building industry is the nation's largest manufacturing activity, representing more than 50% of the nation's wealth and 13% of its Gross Domestic Product. Energy and material consumption in buildings can contribute significantly to global climate change.

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.

A similar concept is natural building, which is usually on a smaller scale and tends to focus on the use of natural materials that are available locally.^[1] Other commonly used terms include sustainable design and green architecture.

The related concepts of sustainable development and sustainability are integral to green building. Effective green building can lead to 1) reduced operating costs by increasing productivity and using less energy and water, 2) improved public and occupant health due to improved indoor air quality, and 3) reduced environmental impacts by, for example, lessening storm water runoff and the heat island effect. Practitioners of green building often seek to achieve not only ecological but aesthetic harmony between a structure and its surrounding natural and built environment, although the appearance and style of sustainable buildings is not necessarily distinguishable from their less sustainable counterparts.

Green building materials

Building materials typically considered to be 'green' include rapidly renewable plant materials like bamboo and straw, lumber from forests certified to be sustainably managed, dimension stone, recycled stone, recycled metal, and other products that are non-toxic, reusable, renewable, and/or recyclable (eg Trass, Linoleum, sheep wool, panels made from paper flakes, baked earth, rammed earth, clay, vermiculite, flax linen, sisal, seagrass, cork, expanded clay grains, coconut, wood fibre plates, calcium sand stone... ^[8]). Building materials should be extracted and manufactured locally to the building site to minimize the energy embedded in their transportation.

Green building practices

Green building brings together a vast array of practices and techniques to reduce and ultimately eliminate the impacts of buildings on the environment and human health. It often emphasizes taking advantage of renewable resources, e.g., using sunlight through passive solar, active solar, and photovoltaic techniques and using plants and trees through green roofs, rain gardens, and for reduction of rainwater run-off. Many other techniques, such as using packed gravel for parking lots instead of concrete or asphalt to enhance replenishment of ground water, are used as well. Effective green buildings are more than just a random collection of environmental friendly technologies, however.^[7] They require careful, systemic attention to the full life cycle impacts of the resources embodied in the building and to the resource consumption and pollution emissions over the building's complete life cycle.

On the aesthetic side of green architecture or sustainable design is the philosophy of designing a building that is in harmony with the natural features and resources surrounding the site. There are several key steps in designing sustainable buildings: specify 'green' building materials from local sources, reduce loads, optimize systems, and generate on-site renewable energy.

[edit] Reduced Energy Use

Main articles: Low-energy house and Zero-energy building

Green buildings often include measures to reduce energy use. To increase the efficiency of the building envelope, (the barrier between conditioned and unconditioned space), they may use high-efficiency windows and insulation in walls, ceilings, and floors. Another strategy, passive solar building design, is often implemented in low-energy homes. Designers orient windows and walls and place awnings, porches, and trees^[9] to shade windows and roofs during the summer while maximizing solar gain in the winter. In addition, effective window placement (daylighting) can provide more natural light and lessen the need for electric lighting during the day. Solar water heating further reduces energy loads.

After heating and cooling loads are reduced, high efficiency cooling, heating, and water heating equipment, along with insulated hot water pipes and properly sealed and insulated ducts increase whole house efficiency. Higher efficiency appliances and other electric devices not only lowers direct energy use, but also lowers cooling loads in the summer by producing less waste heat. Similarly, fluorescent lighting, which uses two-thirds to three-fourths less energy than conventional incandescent bulbs^[10] lowers direct electricity use and cooling loads. Other improvements include adding thermal mass to stabilize daily temperature variations, absorption chillers, optimizing houses for natural ventilation, cool roofs in warm climates, heat recovery ventilation and hot water heat recycling.

Finally, onsite generation of renewable energy through solar power, wind power, hydro power, or biomass can significantly reduce the environmental impact of the building. Power generation is generally the most expensive feature to add to a building.

[edit] Reduced Waste

Green architecture also seeks to reduce waste of energy, water and materials. During the construction phase, one goal should be to reduce the amount of material going to landfills. Well-designed buildings also help reduce the amount of waste generated by the occupants as well, by providing on-site solutions such as compost bins to reduce matter going to landfills.

To reduce the impact on wells or water treatment plants, several options exist. "Greywater", wastewater from sources such as dishwashing or washing machines, can be used for subsurface irrigation, or if treated, for non-potable purposes, e.g., to flush toilets and wash cars. Rainwater collectors are used for similar purposes.

Centralized wastewater treatment systems can be costly and use a lot of energy. An alternative to this process is converting waste and wastewater into fertilizer, which avoids these costs and shows other benefits. By collecting human waste at the source and running it to a semi-centralized biogas plant with other biological waste, liquid fertilizer can be produced. This concept was demonstrated by a settlement in Lubeck Germany in the late 1990s. Practices like these provide soil with organic nutrients and create carbon sinks that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, offsetting greenhouse gas emission. Producing artificial fertilizer is also more costly in energy than this process.^[11]

1. The Primacy of Use Value, Intrinsic Value and Quality: This is the fundamental principle of the green economy as a service economy, focused on end-use, or human and environmental needs. Matter is a means to the end of satisfying real need, and can be radically conserved. Money similarly must be returned to a status as a means to facilitate regenerative exchanges, rather than an end in itself. When this is done in even a significant portion of the economy, it can undercut the totalitarian power of money in the entire economy.

2. Following Natural Flows: The economy moves like a proverbial sailboat in the wind of natural processes by flowing not only with solar, renewable and “negawatt” energy, but also with natural hydrological cycles, with regional vegetation and food webs, and with local materials. As society becomes more ecological, political and economic boundaries tend to coincide with ecosystem boundaries. That is, it becomes bioregional.

3. Waste Equals Food: In nature there is no waste, as every process output is an input for some other process. This principle implies not only a high degree of organizational complementarity, but also that outputs and by-products are nutritious and non-toxic enough to be food for something.

4. Elegance and Multifunctionality: Complex food webs are implied by the previous principle—integrated relationships which are antithetical to industrial society’s segmentation and fragmentation. What Roberts and Brandum (1995) call “economics with peripheral vision,” this elegance features “problem-solving strategies that develop multiple wins and positive side-effects from any one set of actions.”

5. Appropriate Scale/Linked Scale: This does not simply mean “small is beautiful,” but that every regenerative activity has its most appropriate scale of operation. Even the smallest activities have larger impacts, however, and truly ecological activity “integrates design across multiple scales,” reflecting influence of larger on smaller and smaller on larger (Van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996).

6. Diversity: In a world of constant flux, health and stability seem to depend on diversity. This applies to all levels (diversity of species, of ecosystems, of regions), and to social as well as ecological organization.

7. Self-Reliance, Self-Organization, Self-Design: Complex systems necessarily rely on “nested hierarchies” of intelligence which coordinate among themselves in a kind of resonant dance. These hierarchies are built from the bottom up, and—in contrast to civilization’s social hierarchies—the base levels are the most important. In an economy which moves with ecosystem processes, tremendous scope for local response, design and adaptation must be provided, although these local and regional domains must be attuned to larger processes. Self-reliance is not self-sufficiency, but facilitates a more flexible and holistic interdependence.

8. Participation and Direct Democracy: To enable flexibility and resilience, ecological economic design features a high “eyes to acres” ratio (Van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996): lots of local observation and participation. Conversely, ecological organization and new information/communications technologies can provide the means for deeper levels of participation in the decisions that count in society.

9. Human Creativity and Development: Displacing resources from production and tuning into the spontaneous productivity of nature requires tremendous creativity. It requires all-round human development that entails great qualities of nurture. These are qualities of giving and real service that have been suppressed (especially in men) by the social and psychological conditioning of the industrial order. In green change, the personal and political, the social and ecological, go hand in hand. Social, aesthetic and spiritual capacities become central to attaining economic efficiency, and become important goals in themselves.

10. The Strategic Role of the Built Environment, the Landscape and Spatial Design: As Permaculturalist Bill Mollison has emphasized, the greatest efficiency gains can often be achieved by a simple spatial rearrangement of system components. Elegant, mixed-use, integrated design which moves with nature is place-based. In addition, our buildings, in one way or another, absorb around 40% of materials and energy throughput in North America. Thus, conservation and efficiency improvements in this sector impact tremendously on the entire economy.

Green economic conversion must be radical, but it must also be incremental and organic. How is this possible? Rodale cites the need for a kind of economic succession which mimics ecological landscape change. We need “pioneer enterprises” which can thrive in today’s hostile economic landscape, but also prepare the ground for more ecological and egalitarian enterprises to come. A vision of what each sector of the economy would look like in an ecological economy—based on the specifics of each place—is a starting point. This vision must be coupled with practical action in each of these sectors, gradually moving toward this vision. Enough practical activity can eventually generate the impetus for state action to level the playing field for ecological alternatives.