By Jeff Nippes
I remember talking to clients several years ago, long before building Green and LEED really picked up the momentum it has now and a question that I used to get asked was “Why do I want to build green?” What they really meant was why do I want to build green if all it does is take away from my profit margin? It was generally thought that building green and to LEED Standards was just an additional expense and wouldn’t provide any additional revenue for the designer, developer, builder and owner. “It’s fine for tree huggers, let them live in a earth shelter house but I work on a bottom line so unless building green is practical and contributes to my bottom line then I’m really not that interested.”
Now, fast forward to 2010 and with more education on the subject and better standards and better overall understanding of what green building is, it is more of the standard than the anomaly. That has a lot to do with aforementioned profit margin. Building to LEED standards today only adds on average 1.8% to the total building cost which can easily be recovered in the first year or two of operation. (See Also Davis Langdon’s The Cost of Green Revisited http://www.davislangdon.com/USA/Research/ResearchFinder/2007-The-Cost-of-Green-Revisited/) LEED Certified buildings have higher occupancy rates and draw higher rents and a higher ROI. As soon as green building became more profitable it became more interesting to a lot of people. When you really look at it, most LEED and green building strategies involve more common sense than money. For example: Landscape with native plants rather than vegetation that is not native to the region and will thus require less water, use a pervious type of pavement so the water goes right back into the water table rather collecting pollutants and running off and polluting another water source, reuse building materials, buy products that have little or no volatile organic compounds, buy wood with the Forrest Stewardship Council (FSC) seal, buy local building materials when possible since they will have consumed far less resources to travel to the building site all seem like no brainers, require little or no extra money to implement and all provide LEED credit points so today the question isn’t really “Why do I want to build green?” it is, “Why wouldn’t you build green?"
I remember talking to clients several years ago, long before building Green and LEED really picked up the momentum it has now and a question that I used to get asked was “Why do I want to build green?” What they really meant was why do I want to build green if all it does is take away from my profit margin? It was generally thought that building green and to LEED Standards was just an additional expense and wouldn’t provide any additional revenue for the designer, developer, builder and owner. “It’s fine for tree huggers, let them live in a earth shelter house but I work on a bottom line so unless building green is practical and contributes to my bottom line then I’m really not that interested.”
Now, fast forward to 2010 and with more education on the subject and better standards and better overall understanding of what green building is, it is more of the standard than the anomaly. That has a lot to do with aforementioned profit margin. Building to LEED standards today only adds on average 1.8% to the total building cost which can easily be recovered in the first year or two of operation. (See Also Davis Langdon’s The Cost of Green Revisited http://www.davislangdon.com/USA/Research/ResearchFinder/2007-The-Cost-of-Green-Revisited/) LEED Certified buildings have higher occupancy rates and draw higher rents and a higher ROI. As soon as green building became more profitable it became more interesting to a lot of people. When you really look at it, most LEED and green building strategies involve more common sense than money. For example: Landscape with native plants rather than vegetation that is not native to the region and will thus require less water, use a pervious type of pavement so the water goes right back into the water table rather collecting pollutants and running off and polluting another water source, reuse building materials, buy products that have little or no volatile organic compounds, buy wood with the Forrest Stewardship Council (FSC) seal, buy local building materials when possible since they will have consumed far less resources to travel to the building site all seem like no brainers, require little or no extra money to implement and all provide LEED credit points so today the question isn’t really “Why do I want to build green?” it is, “Why wouldn’t you build green?"
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