The green building movement continues to roll. Once a rarity, gold and platinum LEED certifications are a common theme in newspapers and on blogs around the country. Last week, the National Association of Home Builders announced standards for more sustainable residential construction. But the newest frontier in this area is green building codes. Already a number of large cities have adopted standards for public projects. For instance, destroyed by an F-5 tornado last May, the town of Greensburg, KS has decided to make all of its larger city buildings LEED platinum. Now, cities and states have begun to require more efficient building practices for private buildings too.
A new Connecticut law requires that all new public and private buildings costing over $5 million and renovations be built to meet or exceed silver LEED certification standards. The 30,000-ish person town of Monroe, NY, located just west of the West Point Military Academy, has proposed regulations that would make all new housing comply with Energy Star standards, while other buildings larger than 4,000 square feet meet LEED standards.
Now, the big dogs are getting into the mix. Cities councils Los Angeles have voted in favor of a new ordinance ensuring that all private buildings over 50,000 square feet meet a checklist of sustainability requirements. The standards, less stringent than LEED standards, appears to be a negotiated deal between city leaders and building interests. Some groups are advocating to drop the square footage requirements to 25,000 and raising the stringency to LEED silver.
Meanwhile, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels wants to reshape his city into “America’s green building capital”. While his announcement was short on details, he plans to appoint a panel this spring to develop a strategy to reduce energy use in new and existing commercial and residential buildings by 20%. The mayor believes that the initiative will not only move the city toward its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050, but reduce energy bills and spur green collar job creation as well.
source: matterwork.com
This entry was posted
on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Buildings & Cities, Design, Energy, Environment, News, Politics, Regulation.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
