Layman's Blog to Green Building

Today is Earth day...what are you doing for our earth? This is not a question we should ask once a year for Earth day. This is a question we should be asking every day. As caretakers of this earth, we need to leave it a better place for our children especially through our work. What is your company doing in 2016 for a sustainable Ontario? Other TCA members would like to know!  TCA's Environmental Committee has launched a "TCA Green Ambassador Program" where we will be showcasing (online) TCA members that are enjoying success and helping the environment at the same time. There many companies within our ranks that are using efficient, effective, and green products, operations, and practices that benefit their customers and the earth.  Please share your company’s best green initiative whether it is an internal practice, a product you sell, or simply the way you do business.  We will publishing stories online on our committee page - this months pr...

The advent of green building design has challenged the established best practices of building designers.   This requires building designers to have a forward-looking viewpoint with respect to the environmental performance and utilization of the building, as well as the emerging need to plan for decommissioning.  This forces designers to incorporate more parties into the design process than is traditionally necessary, thereby reshaping the roles and responsibilities of all parties involved.  In this blog series we will evaluate how current design practices are being morphed into a more collaborative effort of owners, designers, and operators.  We will also identify the necessary change to planning, and the tools (both existing and developing) to facilitate the changing planning requirements.  By educating and understanding client expectations, as well as methods of quantifying the environmental performance of a building, the planning and design process...

We previously discussed the importance of establishing measurable performance targets for green buildings.  As good as those are, they form an incomplete picture of green building design and construction.  What really brings context to the performance of a green building is when you take your performance metrics, and compare them against established benchmarks. That's where green building design and evaluation systems come in;  Many people know about LEED, BOMA Green Globes, or ASHRAE standards.  These (and other systems and standards) offer baseline performance targets for your building project that establish how good (or bad) your building measures up against an agreed-upon base case. Let's look at a few examples: LEED The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system is a set of quantifiable targets that evaluate your building against many of the performance targets we discussed last week .  The system uses a number of different approache...

There is a lot of confusion on what the definition of a “ Green Building ” means today.  The building design and construction, as well as the facilities management industries are pushing for “greener” buildings, yet for a large part of the industry, there is an abundance of differing opinions of what makes a building “green”.  The challenge of sorting through these varying and sometimes conflicting definitions can create fiscal, technical, and legal problems for designers, builders, and operators alike.   One common problem across all industries striving to be more "green" is that it is difficult as a consumer and corporate user alike to clearly distinguish the claims of products or buildings on sustainable measures, unless one is to use a well developed system of metrics for gauging the actual performance of a building or product against established benchmarks.  When it comes to building design and construction, the metrics are often found in a number of...