Building a Home? Find Green, Not Greenwashing
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The following is an excerpt from When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency by Matthew Stein. It has been adapted for the Web.
To evaluate whether a given building material or system is truly “green,” one must look at the whole life cycle of the material and/or system. For example, since wood is a renewable resource, it is “green” if it is sustainably harvested, but it’s not green if its unsustainable harvest contributes to deforestation. Consider the case of cement, which is the glue that makes concrete hard and strong. Cement is an energy-intensive material to manufacture (contributing to 8 percent to global greenhouse gas emissions), and requires quarrying huge tracts of land to obtain its raw materials. Due to the extreme longevity of concrete-based construction, which can last for many centuries, its use can be considered “green” if it is part of a building system that uses cement efficiently and has insulating features that minimize heating and cooling requirements.
For example, a building with exterior walls composed of solid, concrete-filled, uninsulated concrete blocks, and located in a cold or hot climate, not only uses a high volume of cement to construct the building, but will also require large inputs of energy to heat and/or cool the building over its entire lifetime. On the other hand, various concrete-based building systems using insulated concrete forms (ICFs) will use less cement, and the end result will be a highly insulated, energy-efficient building that consumes a fraction of the energy of an average home. In additional to ICFs, there are other concrete-based building systems using structural insulated concrete panels (SCIPs) that further optimize and reduce both the cement and structural steel content and offer the benefit of a high thermal mass in contact with the living spaces to help stabilize inside air temperatures, further reducing both initial material requirements and energy consumption.
Another example is the use of recycled building materials. In the case of recycled lumber, its use clearly reduces deforestation and saves the energy inputs needed to cut, mill, and transport additional lumber, so it is obviously a “green” alternative. However, to recycle an old window may be a false saving, if the climate is hot or cold and using the old window results in large energy inputs over the life of the building for heating and/or cooling. In this case, the use of the recycled window is definitely not green.
In today’s market, selling yourself or your product as “green” has proven to be a valuable marketing tool. In fact, “greenwashing” (representing a builder, building system, or product as “green” even when it isn’t) has become a real problem. So how is one to know what is truly green and what is not? Most of us don’t have the time, energy, or technical training to properly make this determination on our own. Fortunately, there are organizations out there whose business is to evaluate products, materials, and systems in an unbiased manner, so we can use their certifications and recommendations to help us to make truly green choices in our building decisions.
A great place to start is with BuildingGreen Inc.’s Green Building Products: The GreenSpec Guide to Residential Building Materials. This encyclopedia of green building materials includes paint, structural systems, certified lumber, appliances, site preparations, landscaping, and so on. Manufacturers do not pay to be included in GreenSpec, and the decisions about which products to be included in GreenSpec are based totally on criteria developed by the GreenSpec and Environmental Building News editorial teams. The introduction to Green Building Products offers an excellent description of what makes a product “green,” and they offer a huge amount of free information and articles at www.BuildingGreen.com.
There are independent “green” certification organizations whose stamps you can trust, but be aware that there are also several industry-sponsored look-alikes whose certifications are meaningless (greenwashing). For example, in general you can trust that the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) stamp on lumber indicates that it was harvested by a lumber company that has gone through independent third-party certification to certify that it is operating using sustainable forest management practices. On the other hand, you can’t trust certification from industry-funded knock-offs like the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), which does not require independent, third-party certification, so that basically the fox is guarding the henhouse.
Other trustworthy, independent “green” certifications include LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability). Also, a set of standards is being developed for EPP (Environmentally Preferable Products) by a consortium of green-certification organizations such as Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), Green Seal, GreenBlue, and the Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability (MTS). Even though LEED certification generally applies to commercial buildings and large-scale residential developments, the LEED principles for guiding and evaluating the design and construction process are just as applicable to smallscale residential buildings.
