Green building seems to have settled into a holding pattern. Achieving LEED Silver certification is pretty routine these days. Yet LEED-certified buildings still constitute only 2–3% of the annual U.S. production of commercial and institutional stock.

Certain classes of building owners—colleges and universities, foundations, high-profile corporations, and owners of showcase buildings—still want the plaque on the wall. But many commercial building owners are telling their Building Teams to make the project as green as possible within the budget, but forget about LEED.

TOP GREEN BUILDING ARCHITECTURE FIRMS

2014 Green Building Revenue ($)
1. Gensler $551,570,000
2. Stantec $262,592,351
3. HOK $202,805,000
4. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill $202,149,634
5. HKS $144,102,254

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TOP GREEN BUILDING ENGINEERING FIRMS

2014 Green Building Revenue ($)
1. AECOM $299,310,000
2. Arup $159,256,059
3. Jacobs $156,916,555
4. WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff $100,000,000
5. Thornton Tomasetti $76,950,400

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TOP GREEN BUILDING CONSTRUCTION FIRMS

2014 Green Building Revenue ($)
1. Turner Construction $5,417,890,000
2. Clark Group $2,637,700,000
3. PCL Construction $2,073,100,000
4. Gilbane Building Co. $1,900,209,489
5. Whiting-Turner $1,859,469,849

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That the concept of “green building” has been drilled into the heads of building owners is a tribute to the aggressive marketing of the U.S. Green Building Council. The USGBC, its local chapters, and its more than two hundred thousand LEED Accredited Professionals have been beating the building sustainability drum for two decades. Property owners ignore the USGBC’s mantra of “market transformation” at their own risk.

Now, the green building movement has reached a new phase. Today, the green building movement is all about eliminating toxic substances in building materials and systems and, for manufacturers, issuing environmental and health product declarations—so-called EPDs and HPDs. Whether these efforts will lead to healthier products and building environments remains an open question.

There’s also growing interest in documenting the health and productivity benefits of sustainably designed buildings. We know instinctively that “natural phenomena” like fresh air and sunshine are good for us, but producing scientifically verifiable data to prove their efficacy (not to mention cause and effect) in buildings is much more problematic.

The case for health and productivity in green buildings has to be made inferentially, through epidemiological data, as Adele Houghton, RA, and others are valiantly trying to do (see “Debunking the 5 myths of health data and sustainable design,” www.BDCnetwork.com/5Myths).

Just how far we can push building owners on sustainability is being tested by the International Living Future Institute. Judging by the tiny number of projects taking up the ILFI’s Living Building Challenge, only owners with deep pockets and tons of patience seem willing to put up with the program’s rigorous demands.

Then there’s “net-zero,” the proposition that buildings can produce more energy than they use—a topic BD+C explored in a 2011 white paper (http://bit.ly/1JUtwA2). The trick with NZs is to chop the building’s energy use by 65–70% of normal, primarily by making the envelope as tightly insulated as possible; only then should you plop the PVs and other renewables on to get to zero energy use.

Net-zero buildings are starting to pop up, although hardly in huge numbers. Last month, the California Energy Commission approved new standards to the state’s Title 24 energy code that will require single-family homes and low-rise multifamily buildings, starting in 2017, to trim energy use by 28% versus the 2013 standard, on the way to net-zero by 2020.

Getting to 100% NZ may be unrealistic for speculative commercial buildings, due to the cost of the renewables. (Achieving the 65–70% energy reduction, minus the PVs, still makes sense and should be the new target for AEC teams.) Some public utilities are resisting NZs: they don’t want to dial the power meter back to buy electricity generated by an NZ building.

The nation’s water supply is the latest resource to be threatened. California’s mandatory 25% cut in water use is a harbinger of things to come. The great bulk of water in the U.S. goes toward generating electricity and irrigating crops, but buildings account for 20–25% of freshwater use. As we noted in our 2009 white paper (http://bit.ly/1SoI649), conserving and reusing water will be an issue of national concern in the next decade.

All of the above falls under the rubric of climate change, the subject of yet another (my goodness!) BD+C white paper (http://bit.ly/1fhKY4F). No less a figure than Pope Francis has taken on climate change.

Last month, the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide issued an encyclical, “Laudito Si’,” or “Praised Be” (from a prayer by his moving spirit, St. Francis of Assisi), in which he linked “the greater part of global warming” to human activity. The document challenged the idea of humans having dominion over nature (Genesis 1:28) and called instead for mankind to “cultivate and care for” the garden of the world.

Francis criticized the rich (and rich nations) for exhibiting “consumerist, material behavior” and spoke ardently about the impact of global warming on the poor, saying it “strike[s] in a special way the weakest on the planet.”

The encyclical is sure to be a lively topic of discussion at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris later this year.

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TOP GREEN BUILDING CONSTRUCTION FIRMS

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