Green Building Services

During our our eco-charrette for the Oregon Sustainability Center, we took some time to examine the role that people play in buildings. Apart from the energy and resources that go into constructing a building, with no one inside, a building becomes energy neutral. But once you add the human element and begin to provide for the health, safety and welfare of building occupants, environmental impacts become substantial.

The energy and resource intake and expenditures of a building are mostly around our need to control our environment. We rarely think of occupants as being part of the building, but people are actually the Building’s Metabolism™. Bodies generate heat and absorb it. Ventilation, heating and cooling, the materials that come into the building and the solid waste goes out all contribute to making ourselves comfortable. Our presence and actions place demands on the entire system. As an organism within the building’s metabolism, it’s vitally important to look at our function and responsibility.

Passive Buildings/Active People
We have made our buildings so complex and automated them to such an extent that we have removed ourselves from the process. Occupants expect a building to provide ideal temperatures, optimal light conditions, and all the water they desire without thinking about the resources captured to maintain these benefits. Moreover, the way people do interact with these systems is unpredictable, and individual actions can have large ripple effects.

It’s time to reincorporate the human element into the building function from the earliest phases of design through operations. Rather than overly automating building systems, let’s use our automation technology to give people feedback on their actions and increase accountability. Can we break down information so that what is happening within a building is understandable at the building, organization and personal levels? Facilities personnel should be provided with real-time comprehensible information about how their equipment is performing and what the ramifications are if they alter recommended settings. Occupants could learn to consume fewer resources if they had feedback mechanisms and understand what they do. Imagine a “dashboard” at the restrooms sinks that shows how much water is used if the faucet is left running, or an energy panel in individual office areas that displays the amount of electricity it takes run your personal equipment (computer, cell phone, task light, ipod, etc.) and the impact of turning these things off before you leave your desk.

It becomes important to ask ourselves, how much control over nature do we have to exert to experience comfort? Looking at building programming in new ways could also help bring the people back into the equation of building function. What if there were no specified workstations and we no longer tried to maintain a consistent temperature in all work areas during all seasons? A space conditioning allowance for each floor would let us create areas that are warmer, cooler, brighter, and darker. With a smart monitoring system, an occupant could look up the temperature and illumination (weather) of a specific area and select where they want to be rather than being forced into a general “ideal.”

The Living Building Challenge asks a building to become part of a building, like a system in nature. As the largest component in a building’s metabolism, can we do more? Can we forego our need to control nature and, instead, work within it to become part of the solution?

By Ralph DiNola, GBS Principal, Associate AIA, LEED Faculty

Recently the Green Building Services’ team of Ralph, Terry and I directed a week-long eco-charrette for the Oregon Sustainability Center, which is pursing the Living Building Challenge. For those not familiar, the Living Building Challenge is a standard that far exceeds current building practices and LEED criteria. Working through the concepts during the intensive eco-charrette, we looked past the steep requirements and questioned our own assumptions – and those of the Living Building Challenge – about what resource equity really means. On one question in particular, water became a focal point.

LEED encourages building owners and designers to lower potable water use and try to provide areas where rainwater is absorbed on site. LEED provides very specific, but incremental reduction requirements. The Living Building Challenge jumps over this practice with pre-requisites for net zero water (Prereq. 10: Net Zero Water) and zero storm water discharge (Prereq. 11: Sustainable Water Discharge). This means that the building and landscape will not use any water that does not fall on the site and storm water will not be drained away from the site in pipes. If a project is completed in summer months, you can fill up a cistern once to establish operations, but, in essence, the project will not be connected to the municipal water source. (There are temporary exemptions for areas where the code does not allow water reuse.)

On the surface, this pre-requisite of the Living Building Challenge would appear to be a wholly positive thing. But if we compare the natural hydrology of the site before any building exists, following the requirement without carefully considering its impacts could potentially cause harm. In theory, capturing all of the rain water that falls on the site to use on landscaping and in the building may mean that limited water is returned to the ecological surroundings. By taking this concept to a larger scale – if all the buildings in downtown Portland were to adopt this practice – there could be significant disruption of what should be the normal flow of rainfall into aquifers and rivers, which could have downstream impacts on salmon and other species. Likewise, if we jump from water to energy – if every building was designed to maximize solar collection area in site – the buildings might end up shading significant portions of adjacent sites and denying solar access to their neighbors.

This is not to suggest that the Living Building Challenge doesn’t offer an excellent framework, but we need to recognize that we cannot design in absolutes. The Living Building Challenge asks us to “account for downstream ecosystem impacts” but does not yet provide a metric to judge this by. Buildings must be considered within the context of their ecosystems, and we need to examine our right to hold onto resources.

At the Oregon Sustainability Center, the project team decided our best move would be to first use less water by reusing the rainwater in a variety of forms. We intend to take the cleanest water and cycle it down through the systems: capture it from the sinks to use in toilets, from toilets to use in irrigation. Not only does intelligent reuse of the rainfall allow the project team to minimize the size of the cistern, but fresh water still will be supplied to the aquifer.

In Portland we are fortunate to have plentiful rainfalls that make resource equity possible, but the climate in another city like Reno, Nevada, changes the playing field considerably. If the same solutions would not work on a single building basis, can we address them on a regional scale? What would happen if every building – commercial and residential – retrofitted with only low-flow fixtures? What if everyone used only native landscaping that required no irrigation? Could we achieve true resource equity by greatly reducing our water needs in the first place?

As we look at our resources – and how our claims on them impact the natural systems we rely on – perhaps a site-by-site approach is no longer feasible. The Living Building Challenge encourages scale-jumping, and in some locations this may be exactly what is required. Would a gravity-fed municipal water system, as Portland has, that introduced ecological means to purify the water without chlorine be more sustainable than many independent, building-by-building systems? Perhaps it’s time to think about how we can work collectively across a district or a city to ensure our resources serve all the components of life in the greater region.

By Alan Scott, GBS Principal, AIA, LEED Faculty

Buildings create a variety of environmental impacts – from energy use and depletion of resources and habitat to occupant health effects. But one of the most critical and increasingly used sustainability performance metrics is carbon: the outcome of most of our energy production and the most prevalent greenhouse gas.  Understanding these metric helped the design and construction industry set goals, identify best practices and better manage building-related environmental impacts. As a result, the green building market has matured rapidly over the last several years.

So what can we do about our increasing carbon emissions? Let’s look at where these emissions are generated. The construction and operations of buildings account for almost 40% of U.S. CO2 emissions according to data from the most recent Energy Information Administration Greenhouse Gases report. Transportation and industrial energy uses account for the rest of the pie, at 34% and 27%, respectively. Together, these emissions account for more than 80% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Clearly, it makes sense to focus on buildings in attempting to reduce emissions. But in order to reach CO2 reduction targets, we also need to take into account how these three major sectors interact and how we can create synergies in emissions reduction strategies.

As projects and their influences become more complex, and as the environmental imperatives become more demanding, the need for reliable analytical tools and techniques grows. Planners and urban designers have numerous tools that help them better understand the environmental impacts of their decisions. But the information gained from these tools is rarely incorporated into building-scale analytical profiles. If we were to not only incorporate them, but scale out beyond the building as well, we could address the non-building components that impact energy and sustainability.

Transportation to and from our buildings is driven by variables such as location, density, walkability, infrastructure and proximity to transit, just to name a few. Transportation energy can be three times or more than the carbon impacts of the building’s operation. As you can see in the accompanying graph, urban density is inversely proportional to transport-related energy consumption. Denser development is lower-carbon development.

Utility infrastructure is another great example. Material-intensive infrastructures like buildings have significant embodied energy and require continuous energy input for operations and maintenance. The amount, type and efficiency of our infrastructure is directly tied to where we locate as well as how we design and integrate the components that require infrastructure services in our communities. Most importantly, it sets the baseline for the financial and environmental demand of the system over the life of the project.

Another key influencing variable on project energy and sustainability performance is people. A community is not sustainable if the spaces between buildings are not serving the needs of building users. Planning and design to promote the health, well-being and productivity of people helps to instill a sense of stewardship over the environment that supports them. Further, planning, programming and design can help encourage pro-environmental behaviors – such as walking – the preferred practice.

GBS is helping to bring all these design disciplines together. We provide comprehensive analyses and objective decision making to the table, so our clients can meet the environmental and regulatory imperative with a lot more confidence. As we all work together to approach buildings within their greater context, we can effectively reduce our carbon emissions and improve our environmental outlook.

Viabhav

Team Manager & Senior Consultant

Advanced Climate Solutions