Sustainable and Green Building
Sustainable and Green are terms that are being tossed around more and more frequently, especially in the world of construction and home design. If you have a product to sell, labelling it “green” is the first consideration in your marketing plan. But just what do these terms really mean?
Wikipedia defines Green Building as “the practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings use resources.” It always makes me wonder what qualifies as green under this definition. In our world of advertising and the “next greatest innovation,” we might immediately think of some new techno-gizmo that controls energy consumption or floor tiles made from recycled beer cans.
I would suggest that you look at “green” and “sustainable” in the larger picture. Just because a product is made from recycled material does not mean it is doing good deeds for the environment. The current craze for ethanol in gasoline is a case in point. Ethanol consumes more energy to produce it than it provides. a part of that is because ethanol can not be pumped through pipes, like gasoline and oil, so trucks must transport it to distribution centers. the trucks, of course, consume fuel. Add to that the fact that making ethanol uses up the food that millions of very poor people around the world desparately need and you will see the lunacy of using our food for fuel. We jumped on ethanol before considering the big picture.
In building, sometimes the tried and true materials are actually more “green” and more “sustainable” than you might think. Consider brick. Although brick consumes a large amount of energy to produce, it is made of readily available, abundant, non-toxic, clean materials – clay and shale. Bricks last a long, long time, so replacement is not necessary , meaning that no future energy or resources are a part of brick’s “life cycle.” And even when bricks are discarded, they are inert in the earth, thus not contributing to ground water pollution.
So when choosing your building materials and products, consider the big picture.
If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.
Bill Hirsch
www.designingyourperfecthouse.com
Tags: dream house, green, homebuilding, house design, sustainable
