Sustainability in Design
Sustainable is defined by Merriam Webster’s dictionary as “relating to a lifestyle involving the use of [a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged].”[1] This word is being used increasingly more often. As the supply of fossil fuels diminish in the world, people are looking to other ways to produce energy. These ways may not produce enough energy even combined to support the extravagant lifestyles people live though. So not only does the production of energy have to change, but the way energy is used also must change. The main sectors that consume almost forty percent of the energy produce are the residential and commercial sectors. Commercial and residential buildings consume around seventy percent of the electricity in the United States.[2] Green design has been around for almost fifty years, but recently it has started to become very important. Having energy efficient buildings is now a goal of companies and cities worldwide. Most buildings designed by architects today are considered green and architects have been continuously developing new ways to make buildings environmentally friendly. Sustainable design does not restrict creativity or anything else for buildings, but it forces the designers to be more creative. There are many new ways that green buildings are being designed today and these buildings have positive affects on the environment. There are drawbacks too, and these also need to be looked at when considering sustainable design.
The first thing to understanding sustainable design is to look at its history. Some practices that are considered sustainable, such as using local materials or the sun for passive heating, can be traced back to primitive eras millennia ago. The modern movement began in the 1960s and 1970s with the environmental movement combined with a rise in the price of oil, but the field became united in the 1990s. The government started to back the green movement in the 1990s by launching the ENERGY STAR program in 1992. The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) was founded in 1993 and the first version of LEED qualification was established in 1998.[3] LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is an internationally recognized ratings system developed by the USGBC and is now on its third version, launched in April of 2009. The LEED program is aimed at improving energy savings, water efficiency, carbon dioxide emissions, indoor environmental quality, and the stewardship of resources. Not only does it provide a basis for green building design, but it also applies to the construction, operation and maintenance of buildings. LEED certification is applicable to all building types and as referenced to in the previous sentence, it applies to all the phases of a building’s lifecycle. A third party does the evaluation and the score a building receives is out of 100. There are four different types of certification depending on the score a building receives. It is LEED certified if it receives above forty points. It reaches silver once it surpasses fifty points, and if it gets above sixty points it becomes gold rated. The highest rating, platinum, is only for buildings that score above eighty points on the evaluation. There are five main categories buildings are evaluated on along with two bonus categories. The five categories are as follows: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environment quality. Sustainable sites checks to see if the building has a minimal impact on local ecosystems, the appropriate landscaping, if it relies on smart transportation, and if it reduces erosion, light pollution, and construction pollution. Water efficiency covers the smarter use of water, and installing efficient appliances. This section aims to reduce water use due to the fact that buildings use large amounts of potable water. The energy and atmosphere section makes sure buildings are monitoring their energy use and using efficient appliances. It also checks on where the energy is coming from, if the energy is being generated on site or coming from renewable or clean sources. The materials and resources category looks at reuse and recycling. It aims to get buildings to reduce waste during both construction and operation phases, this also includes transportation of materials used. It tries to get buildings to use local materials. The fifth category, indoor environment quality, covers natural daylight and views, improving acoustics, and making the indoor air quality better. The two bonus categories buildings can receive points in cover innovative designs, using new strategies and technologies, and also the regional priorities of the area as determined by the USGBC. [4] [5]
The LEED program has not only had an effect on buildings but it has also affected materials produced for homes. Now materials are being made with one hundred percent recycled content and they also have to look how the material will be disposed of afterwards. No material can be environmentally friendly but now designers and clients are looking for materials that have the smallest impact on the environment. [6]
Sustainable design does not have to be all about being LEED certified. It can just be small and simple changes made around a home to make it more energy efficient. Things like new and better insulation in a house along with low-leak windows can go a long way in helping to save energy and also money on heating bills. Just with these three things the energy saved was around twenty-two to twenty-three percent. Although these solutions are very simple to add onto a building there are some drawbacks. The main problem with these installations is the price. A report cited by a New York Times article did computer tests using these three additions to buildings in multiple cities. The results showed that it would take around eleven years to payback the installation costs. The shortest amount of time was in Chicago, but it still took nine years. These times were just for the smaller things that can be done to retrofit a building. Other technologies that can be just as helpful to move towards reducing the energy use even more can be just as costly. Some can even take more than one decade to pay off.[7] With a timeline like this, many people are reluctant to do this for their homes. The cost problem does not affect large commercial buildings as much since their owners expect the buildings to last for a long period of time and they will certainly be paid back for their investment in green design.
Despite the cost setbacks, some people are still interested in building zero energy buildings. There are four different types of zero energy buildings, each defining zero energy in different ways. These four definitions are net-zero site energy, net-zero source energy, net-zero energy costs and net-zero energy emissions. These buildings are not very common but the ones that were used in a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have energy savings on site between twenty-five and sixty-eight percent. [8] Progress continues to be made on advancing technology so create these zero energy buildings and universities are doing their part. Every two years a solar decathlon is held in Washington D.C. where teams from universities across the world design and create houses that are powered by sunlight. The houses have to be completely self sufficient, efficient, and affordable. These houses show how to create smart home systems, and greatly reduce carbon emissions without giving up the comfort of a modern home. The houses have to be able to maintain all the normal functions of a house, such as hot water to lighting and powering the television. These houses, while they just go back to the universities that created them, show that an affordable, self-sustainable home is possible. The solar decathlon not only showcases these innovate homes but it also trains young designers to think of the environment when designing buildings. [9]
While the solar decathlon shows that homes can be both affordable and sustainable, there are many examples of commercial buildings that illustrate sustainability. One innovative and relatively new example of sustainable design in a commercial office building is the Council House 2 in Melbourne, Australia. Built in 2006, this building uses many new sustainable strategies, specifically in its mechanical systems. While there are only so many materials to make buildings out of and some are more sustainable than others, mechanical systems can continuously be updated and changed for different buildings. The CH2 uses thermal masses and phase changing materials to regulate the internal temperatures of the building instead of conventional air conditioning. The thermal massing reduces the used energy by fourteen percent by trapping the cold night air and cooling the building off in the morning. Even the facades of the building are incorporated in the internal climate control. One façade has rotating timber panels that open and close depending on the sun, one façade has planter boxes up the whole side to block direct sunlight from the windows, and another façade has integrated air shafts that bring in fresh air behind a series of rain collecting towers that funnel the rainwater into the basement to cool the mechanical rooms. One of the most innovative parts of the building is the phase changing materials that help to cool the building. These materials are used about eighty percent of the time and they are much more efficient than pumping cold air throughout the building or using ice to cool the water that is pumped through pipes in the building to cool it. Another innovative part of the mechanical system is the sewage-mining system. This system takes sewage from a nearby sewer system and separates and cleans the water so that it can be used as nonpotable water. This water is then used for flushing toilets, watering plants, or other things. All of these environmental strategies were added for the comfort of the occupants. At the same time, they show how innovative and creative architects and engineers can become when designing a sustainable building. These environmental strategies have a good impact on the world and they also, in this case, helped to Improve productivity in the employees working there, which ends up saving almost one million dollars for the city annually.[10]
These system changes in the CH2 building are very helpful. Even some of the smaller things that have not been mentioned lessen the amount of energy that has to be used in the building throughout the workday. A study was done on the energy emissions and consumption in Chinese commercial buildings and the findings showed a steady increase in energy usage. The total amount of energy consumed by commercial buildings was predicted to be 13.2 quads in 2020, up from 4.6 quads in 2005. The largest cause of this growth was lighting and equipment. By designing the mechanical systems, the heat and air conditioning, of a building to be green, the amount of energy used by equipment drops. It can be done, as it was in the CH2 building, so these predictions should drop and energy can be conserved.[11]
Clearly, while there may be some costs to sustainable design, they are not a problem when looking at the whole project. The costs that take so long to repay, as mentioned in the New York Times article, were from retrofitting buildings. If these buildings are designed with environmental mechanical systems and materials from the beginning they will be more efficient and more cost effective. Sustainable design will continue to grow as new innovations in materials and systems come out. With universities training young architects in sustainable design already, the green building movement should continue to grow. The solar decathlon homes are affordable and efficient and they show that creating sustainable homes is realistic and practical. If students designed the solar decathlon homes, residential architects can do the same. LEED certification provides a good starting point for these efforts and sustainable buildings in general. Sustainable design is efficient and can be affordable. It is a step in the right direction to become more efficient and reduce the amount of energy the world uses. [1] Merriam-Webster Online, Sustainable - Definition and More From the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2010, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sustainable (accessed April 27, 2010).
[2] Paul Torcellini, Shanti Pless, Michael Deru and Drury Crawley, Zero Energy Buildings: A Critical Look at the Definition, Conference Paper (Pacific Grove: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2006).
[3] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Basic Information | Green Building | US EPA, April 2, 2010, http://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/pubs/about.htm.
[4] U.S. Green Building Council, USGBC: LEED, 2010, http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CategoryID=19.
[5] Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC: Building Green - LEED Certification Information, http://www.nrdc.org/buildinggreen/leed.asp (accessed April 27, 2010).
[6] Cheryl O'Brien, How "Sustainability" Is Changing How We Make and Choose Products, Preprint, U.S. Department of Energy, Idaho National Laboratory (Idaho National Laboratory, 2006).
[7] Saquib Rahim, "Can Green Buildings Pass Payback Tests?," The New York Times, February 27, 2009.
[8] Paul Torcellini, Shanti Pless, Michael Deru and Drury Crawley, Zero Energy Buildings: A Critical Look at the Definition, Conference Paper (Pacific Grove: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2006).
[9] U.S. Department of Energy, DOE Solar Decathlon: About Solar Decathlon, April 14, 2010, http://www.solardecathlon.gov/about.cfm.
[10] Russell Fortmeyer, Architecture, Hot and Cold | Continuing Education | Architectural Record, January 2008, http://construction.com/CE/articles/0801edit-1.asp.
[11] David Fridley, Nina Zheng and Nan Zhou, Estimating Total Energy Consumption and Emissions of China's Commercial and Office Buildings, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley: Environmental Protection Agency, 2008). David Fridley, Nina Zheng and Nan Zhou, Estimating Total Energy Consumption and Emissions of China's Commercial and Office Buildings, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley: Environmental Protection Agency, 2008).
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