Commercial Remodeling: February 2008 Archives
"Green buildings are but part of a larger and more comprehensive landscape of conservation and sustainable development. The President's Council on Sustainable Development set 10 goals, including health and the environment, economic prosperity, conservation of nature, and stewardship. " Green Sage
Goal Six, “Sustainable Communities,” requires us to “encourage people to work together to create healthy communities where natural and historic resources are preserved, jobs are available, sprawl is contained, neighborhoods are secure, education is lifelong, transportation and health care are accessible, and all citizens have opportunities to improve the quality of their lives.”
Razing old buildings is usually not green. By shunting all those destroyed building materials to the landfill, the building team increases methane emissions at the landfill, and additional emissions to produce the replacement materials! Not green!
" The LEED rating system certainly does not subtract points for the loss of the embodied energy in the old building or the energy expended in razing and carting it away to the landfill. Nor does it give points for salvaging “first growth” wood or masonry materials to be used elsewhere," says James Kienle, in his GreenSage article.
The potential results of ignoring the need to balance the new construction of green buildings with sustaining and improving the existing built environment has prompted Wayne Curtis to write in “A Cautionary Tale“ in Preservation magazine: ”One might be tempted to compare the recent green wave with the rise of Modernism more than a half-century ago.
Planners and architects back then didn't just want buildings to look different; they also wanted to change the direction society was headed. The old ways of thinking were outmoded. Yesterday's buildings solved yesterday's problems; new buildings were needed to solve the problems of today-and tomorrow.
The result was urban renewal, and it left many of our best urban areas in tatters and many of our historic buildings in piles of rubble.
Uh-oh!
Ultimately, as Carl Elefante, AIA, LEED-AP, eloquently says, “We can not build our way to sustainability; we must conserve our way to it.”
