Green Design

Sustainable building design offers significant advantages including energy and water use reduction, air quality improvement, and increased material efficiency.

Let’s take a quick look:

What? Reduced Energy Use: Passive design such as daylighting, thermal mass, and shading, or by utilizing high performance systems, can reduce the demands on systems.

Why?  It decreases the need on polluting fossil fuels and power plants.

What? Reduced Water Use: Certain landscape, hardscape and roof designs that use storm water runoff decreases the demands on storm and sewer systems.

Why? This reduces the strain on local, regional, and global waterways and lessens pollution.

What? Increased Material Efficiency: Buildings can be built by local and natural materials.

Why? This helps decrease air pollution from long distance transportation of materials as well as the energy (and often chemicals) used to created artificial building materials. Also using recycled, reclaimed, or salvaged materials means less landfill.

What & why? Economic Advantages: Utilizing the above, you pay less for energy, water, transportation, fuel, maintenance as well as reducing costly employee turnover or sick leave because there is less toxicity in the building.