The Brilliance of Green Building is Shining at Rio+20

By Jason Hartke, U.S. Green Building Council

Cross-posted from U.S. Green Building Council’s Blog

It is time that we steered by the stars, not the lights of each passing ship.”
— General Omar Bradley

The green building world knows the following statistic all too well. On average, we spend 90 percent of our time indoors. That’s 21.6 hours out of every day. That’s 328 and a half days every year. Inside a building.

And we certainly take this to heart because, while we’re spending all this time inside, the quality of air we’re breathing is on average 3-5 times more polluted than outside, according to the EPA.

Here at Rio+20, the historic UN Conference on Sustainable Development, a strong global contingency of green building advocates have been spreading the word about the triple-bottom-line benefits to green building.

Sure, the strict business case for green building is stronger than ever. Much of that is based on the deep energy reductions that come from green building projects (See Greg Kats’ analysis about the amazing net present value of green building in his book Greening our Built World).

But green building is not about some narrow crusade to drive energy efficiency alone. Instead, it’s all about a sophisticated approach to balance multiple sustainability values, like energy, water conservation, daylighting, indoor air quality, resiliency, siting & location and others – that ensure we are working to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously. The brilliance of green building – and the reason so many international stakeholders are flocking to accelerate action in this area – is the integrated framework that drives synergies across the sustainability spectrum.

So too, is the goal of Rio+20.

In fact, this novel idea was born and delivered to the world at the original Earth Summit twenty years ago. In two words – sustainable development – we committed to a path that would guide our actions, a course that ensures economic prosperity, social inclusion and environmental protection.

No longer guided by the lights of other ships, instead, we look to the stars.

1. 
   On September 28th, 2012 at 6:10 am Mike S Said:

   Many times home builders throw away many scrap pieces of wood that for building code reasons cannot be reused in their current project. I think it would be great to talk to your home builder or contruction/home remodeling company and tell them about online resources like houston.theconex.com where they can buy, sell, and trade their scraps to other interested individuals. The fact is that once a container of trash is sent to the dump, it is the policy of most cities that you cannot take any material away even if it has not been scooped up yet by the dozers (even if it is clean and in the back of another pickup truck). These city rules make it very difficult to reuse these perfectly clean materials.

2. 
   On October 1st, 2012 at 5:27 pm Gumby Said:

   What home builders need to have at construction sites are two seperate containers with one for trash and antoher for recycling much like what homeowners already use (brown and blue) Same thing only bigger containers!

3. 
   On October 1st, 2012 at 5:28 pm Gumby Said:

   Electricans snipped off a lot of copper wiring bits as they install wiring.. I once collected 60 pounds of copper wires lying around the floors at a site.. Money, money money !!