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How Can I Make My Building a Green Building?

Designing a green building or transforming your current building into a green building takes a steady approach towards all the various aspects that make your building green.

You can either transform your building into a green building all in one shot or take steps towards a greener and greener building until you have fulfilled all the green building requirements of your city, state, or country.

There are a number of ways to make your building green:

Energy

Consider an intelligent, efficient, and sustainable approach to how you produce and use your electricity. This includes minimizing energy use and waste at all stages of your building and designing, and making ways for your new building to run with less energy while maintaining or increasing comfort, and educating and helping building users to be more energy-efficient.

Renewable and sustainable energy is also a very key part of a green building. Integrating renewable energy and low-carbon technologies to supply your building’s energy.

Water

Safeguarding natural resources including water by exploring ways to improve drinking and wastewater efficiency, harvesting water for safe indoor use in innovative ways, and generally minimizing water use in buildings.

Also consider the impact your building has on your surroundings, on stormwater and drainage infrastructure, ensuring these are not put under undue stress or prevented from doing their job.

Reuse of Materials

Using fewer, more durable, and sustainably sourced materials and generating less waste, as well as accounting for a building’s end-of-life stage by designing for demolition waste recovery and reuse. This includes engaging building users in reuse and recycling.

Health

Green buildings promote the health and well being of those within the building, this can be achieved by:
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Bringing fresh air inside, delivering good indoor air quality through ventilation, and avoiding materials and chemicals that create harmful or toxic emissions.

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Incorporating natural light and views to ensure building users’ comfort and enjoyment of their surroundings, and reducing lighting energy needs in the process.

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Designing for ears as well as eyes. Acoustics and proper sound insulation play important roles in helping concentration, recuperation, and peaceful enjoyment of a building in educational, health, and residential buildings.

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Ensuring people are comfortable in their everyday environments, creating the right indoor temperature through passive design or building management and monitoring systems.

Keeping a Green Environment

It’s hard to imagine an urban environment as a green environment since its very existence means some form of nature had to be destroyed. However, a green building works to promote better life and the environment by keeping the environment green.

This can be done by preserving nature, and ensuring diverse wildlife and land quality are protected or enhanced by the building, for example, remediating and building on polluted land or creating new green spaces. This also includes looking for ways you can make your urban areas more productive, bringing both wildlife and agriculture into our cities.

Structure

Life is an ever-changing form and so is nature. For that reason, climate policies, and green building requirements may change from time to time as well as your building’s impact on the environment. Part of being a green building means having a resilient and flexible structure.

Adapting to a changing climate situation, ensuring resilience to events such as flooding, earthquakes, or fires so that our buildings stand the test of time and keep people and their belongings safe.

Designing flexible and dynamic spaces, anticipating changes in their use over time, and avoiding the need to demolish, rebuild or significantly renovate buildings to prevent them from becoming obsolete.

Community

Green buildings also work to connect people and communities. This can be done by:

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Creating environments that connect and enhance communities, such as meeting places, parks, and places for activities. When designing your new green building, always ask what this building will do or add to its community in terms of positive economic and social effects, and engage local communities in planning.

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Ensuring transport and distance to amenities are considered in the design, reducing the impact of personal transport on the environment, and encouraging environmentally friendly options such as walking or cycling. A building that promotes bicycle or electric transport is an example.

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Exploring the potential of both ‘smart’ and information communications technologies to communicate better with the world around us, for example through smart electricity grids that understand how to transport energy where and when it is needed.

Consider all stages of a building’s life cycle

Seeking to lower environmental impacts and maximize social and economic value over a building’s whole life cycle includes thinking green from design, construction, operation, and maintenance, through to renovation and eventual demolition.

Ensure that embodied resources, such as the energy or water used to produce and transport the materials in the building are minimized so that buildings are truly low-impact.