Green Concepts and Vocabulary 31

by Judith Heerwagen and Leah Zagreus for the U.S. Department of

Energy (2005).
• Life-Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) by Sieglinde Fuller. National Institute
of Standards and Technology, in WBDG. Updated 2008.
• 2007 The Cost of Green Revisited, Lisa Fay Matthiessen and Peter
Morris, Davis Langdon, 2007.
• Measuring performance of sustainable buildings. JA Todd, KM Fowler—
Pacific Northwest National laboratory, 2010—wbdg.org.
What is common to most assessment schemes essentially is the concept
of looking at the complete building, evaluating impacts in various catego-
ries then weighting the scores in some way, tallying them up, and giving
an overall score. Important categories to be considered typically include
energy, water use, waste, health, materials impact, and future adaptableness.
But condensing the performance into a single score is not a simple task
and necessitates having the comparative relevance and importance of the
various issues to be addressed by apportioning more points to the more
important sections. Energy, for example, is a key criterion and is therefore
typically given greater weighting than other criteria.
It is problematic that while we witnessed a substantial building boom in
recent years, it was often underpinned by inferior design and construction
strategies including highly inefficient HVAC systems, thus placing buildings
at the top of the list of contributors to global warming. Federal and private
organizations are making serious attempts to address these problems with
some success, and due partly to these efforts we are now witnessing a surge
of interest in green concepts and sustainability. Many developers and proj-
ect owners have become aware of the numerous benefits of incorporating
green strategies and are increasingly aspiring to achieve green certification
for their buildings, particularly LEED certification. The principal objectives
of the green building rating systems are essentially to create incentives to
produce high-performance buildings and to increase demand for sustain-
able construction. Green buildings have been shown to be economically
viable, ecologically benign and whose operation and maintenance have
proven over the long term to be sustainable and very viable.
This encouraged the collaboration of the Partnership for Achieving
Construction Excellence and the Pentagon Renovation and Construction
Program Office who together recently issued a Field Guide for Sustainable
Construction which consists of 10 chapters:
Chapter 1: Procurement – Specific procurement strategies to ensure
sustainable construction requirements are addressed.