Remodeling Your HomeÖ continued
Green building refers to land-use, building design, and construction strategies that reduce the environmental impacts buildings have on their surroundings. While there is no one right technique for designing and building a green building, they often:
-Preserve the natural vegetation -Contain non-toxic or recycled-content building materials -Maintain good indoor air-quality -Use water and energy efficiently -Conserve natural resources -Feature natural lighting -Feature flexible interiors -Recycle construction and demolition waste.
Besides the financial savings mentioned on the previous page, these techniques alsoÖ.
- Conserving resources is a cornerstone of green building techniques. A standard wood-framed house consumes over one acre of forest, and the waste produced during construction averages from 3 to 7 tons. However, green builders often select materials with some recycled content and attempt to optimize the use of such resources.
- There are more than 76 million residential buildings and nearly 5 million commercial buildings in the U.S. today.Ý Together, they use one-third of all the energy consumed in the U.S., and two-thirds of all electricity.Ý Commercially available, cost-effective energy technologies could reduce overall energy consumption in the United States by as much as one-third, a savings of some $343 billion.
- Buildings are a major source of the pollution that causes urban air quality problems and global warming. For example, they account for 49% of sulfur dioxide emissions and 25% of nitrous oxide emissions, both of which damage urban air quality, as well as 35% of our carbon dioxide emissions, the chief pollutant blamed for climate change.Ý Among the many opportunities to make buildings cleaner, if only 10% of U.S. homes used solar water-heating systems, we would avoid 8.4 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year.ÝÝ
Developed for the City of Palo Alto by Darice Chang, Stanford Student in the Community Writing Project, March 2002.