I haven’t even begun to wrap my head around the various code, guidelines and schemes that have sprung up around environmentally sustainable building over the last five or so years. So far, the ones I’ve seen mentioned are:
Code for Sustainable Homes
It’s been mandatory since May for all new builds to be rated using the Code for Sustainable Homes, that’s if you can figure out what it is. Homes are given a star rating, between 1 and 6, where 1 star is the basic rating and 6 star is the best. It measures pretty much everything, from energy and Co2 emissions to waste, pollution and materials.
Standard Assessment Procedure
Rates the energy performance of dwellings, measuring energy costs for lighting and space/water heating.
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
A ‘Green Building Rating System‘, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which rates the design, construction and operation of buildings. It focuses on “performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality.”
BREEAM Rating System
Another UK scheme from the Building Research Establishment (BRE) which seems to be a lot like the Code for Sustainable Homes, but I can’t immediately see from the website if two are actually the same thing or different.
Passivhaus
A voluntary German standard for energy usage, Passivehaus is also promoted in the US.
It’s going to take more than a little willpower to start reading through the details for all of the these schemes and, given that I am so far away from builging, I wonder if there’s any point. By the time Kevin and I break ground, it will all have changed anyway.
I note from the ISite blog that the UK Green Building Council “has promised an open source sustainability code, to help address the confusion arising from the myriad of different green building standards with a new Code for Sustainable Buildings, joining in the debate / tussle between LEED and BREEAM.”
The UK-GBC say:
UK-GBC Chairman Peter Rogers added, “The UK-GBC wants to see very wide take-up of robust and customer-friendly tools, and we believe that the standards at the heart of a new Code for Sustainable Buildings should be ‘open source’, meaning that such a Code could potentially be incorporated into a range of different tools, from a range of providers who could then compete in terms of service provision, without confusing the industry with different standards.”
And ISite suggests that they adopt a Creative Commons licence, which I think is a great idea. I just hope that they make it much simpler for novices to understand, and ensure that third parties can use the information to provide tools to help people actually implement the code.
Because all the green building codes, guidelines and schemes in the world are worthless if no one understands or implements them.
