Sustainable Home Building 2.0

Admit it. Someone mentions the phrase, “sustainable home building” and your mind creates images of wood-burning stoves, and toilets that don’t quite flush. Sure, the environmentalists might have a point when they talk about finite natural-resource reserves, but eco-friendly homes just don’t have the amenities your high-end customers are seeking. Building green, you think, will simply turn your black ink red.

This is not the case anymore. Aided by the success of both local and national energy-efficient home building initiatives, backers of broader-reaching sustainable efforts are seeing growing interest among both buyers and builders in further improving home comfort and performance. Local government officials also are getting involved, with a number of municipalities encouraging or enforcing sustainable practices in their building codes.

And, there are more resources than ever for builders interested in constructing sustainable homes. Many local home builder associations — including groups in Los Angeles, Kansas City, Atlanta, Boston and Denver — now have operational green building programs, offering guidance and, in some cases, marketing assistance.

Where these programs don’t exist, builders can turn to a vast network of information online or in a growing library of books on the topic. Building-product manufacturers, too, are providing more low-impact, high-performance building materials for those seeking alternatives to standard offerings.

Sustainability defined

Learning just what the phrase “sustainable design” means is the first step toward developing a green building practice.

“Universally, ‘green building’ has evolved into a term that indicates resource efficiency and environmental consciousness,” says Ray Tonjes, president of Austin-based Ray Tonjes Builder Inc., president of the Texas Homebuilders Association and chair, National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Green Building Subcommittee. “The word ‘green’ is used in a lot of different industries. It’s becoming synonymous with being good stewards of our environment.”

Until recently, many environmentally conscious builders focused on energy efficiency to limit impact on surroundings, and many local and national programs had the goal of boosting the efficiency of their community’s, or the nation’s, housing stock. Reducing energy use is a key component of sustainable building. However, the real vision is broader, encompassing an improved indoor environment and conservation of the full range of resources used to build a home, from the amount of wood in its framing to the energy used to transport that material.

Today’s sustainable building programs generally break their efforts into three distinct categories: energy conservation, resource conservation and indoor-air quality, according to Kim Master, LEED, a senior associate of the Boulder, Colo., Green Building Guild and operational manager of What’s Working, a national resource center for sustainable home building. However, specific strategies for meeting performance targets in each of these categories vary widely, because local conditions and codes can be so different from place to place.

The NAHB’s “Green Building Guidelines,” released in January 2005, is one of the newer efforts to offer guidance to builders who want to build more sustainable housing. The group prepared this new document, available free on its website (see sidebar on pg. 37 for information on this and other web-based resources), primarily for local home builder associations to use in setting up their own green building programs. Group officials say their document’s flexible and voluntary nature makes it a good starting point for local associations, regardless of their location.