Green Means
Sustainable Communities
By Shannon Scott
Through
local action, everyone can contribute to environmental stewardship and
consequent economic responsibility.
Traditional
construction practices prove the single largest contributor to land, soil, and
water degradation. Cities and towns, the greater built
environment, inefficiently consume earth’s resources and economic assets. Every community and individual world-wide is now
faced with finding the best-suited solutions to save resources and costs.
Sustainable
behavior must be profitable from construction throughout a building’s life or
else no developer or building owner will build green. Two practices can help ensure environmental
soundness and cost effectiveness: life cycle analysis (LCA) and life cycle
costing (LCC).
LCA is an
investigation and valuation of all environmental impacts of products over the
course of their useful life, from either cradle to grave (creation to landfill
waste) or cradle to cradle (origin to reuse or recyclability). Life cycle analysis ascertains the full cost
of all components of a building or development to humans, the environment, and
the economy.
LCC determines
the full life cycle costs of all components used in a building and the building
itself including ongoing maintenance and operations over its useful life from
cradle to cradle or cradle to grave.
Comparing traditionally designed, built, and operated buildings with
more sustainably designed and constructed buildings yields eye opening results. For developers, true green homes, not
green-washed homes where developers falsely advertise green living simply
because they’ve put in energy efficient appliances, sell more quickly for more
money. Commercial and industrial
building owners and operators realize savings in operations, increased employee
productivity, and higher resale values.
Smart urban
planning utilizes land wisely, offers beautiful and functional, sustainable
architecture, connects people with one another and open space, supports healthy
human occupation, increases commerce and makes inhabitants feel better. Great cities, towns, and buildings are
enduring, attractive, no larger than necessary, adaptable to other future uses,
use resources efficiently, and meet the needs of the area and society
contemporarily and for generations to come.
The sketch that
this newspaper showed of Elko County’s proposed recreation center, a stunning architectural
rendering, ought to have sustainability goals, reduced long term operational
costs, and community connectivity at the forefront. Looks aren’t everything and fade fast,
especially in traditional construction resulting in wastefully high operating
costs.
Given our
vast land area, public transportation must be paramount to reduce pollution,
traffic congestion, and allow more tax payers to access the facility –
especially children and the elderly. Any
new municipal facility should allow residents to walk or cycle to it, and be
centrally located to all major residential areas.
A good
municipal site, in Nevada at least, must support passive heating and cooling, to
help ensure long-term sustainability.
Ideally, any public building would operate with net-zero energy use –
meaning co-generation of electricity and selling back to the utility provider
thus further minimizing costs to tax payers.
A community recreation facility should provide
preferred parking areas for hybrid or electric cars and carpools. Reuse waste water in landscaping and help reduce
storm water runoff – perhaps have a living roof. All lumber used in the building should be FSC
certified and all steel from recycled sources.
Recycled steel is plentiful and relatively inexpensive. Green insulation comes in all types and forms
and there’s no excuse for not using something environmentally friendly and
human safe.
Here in
Nevada there is absolutely no excuse for any swimming pool that operates year
round not to be solar heated with only a minimally sized boiler for back up. Many municipalities beg for the amount of
direct sun or solar gain we have, so let’s capitalize on it.
Wasteful,
destructive, toxic, and expensive construction practices are quickly going the
way of the dinosaur. We don’t want our
community to be a dying one. A
neighborhood trying to attract sustainable new businesses that puts human health,
environmental welfare, and economic needs first leads and breaks new ground green
for green building standards. When individuals,
business owners, tax payers, and governments have a choice, they choose
healthy, sustainable, and green.
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