What is green building?
Green building – also known as sustainable or high performance building – is the practice of: • Increasing the efficiency with which buildings and their sites use and harvest energy, water, and materials; and • Protecting and restoring human health and the environment, throughout the building life-cycle: siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation and deconstruction.
Green building is also known as “sustainable building” or “environmental building” and refers to increasing efficiency with which buildings and their sites use energy, water and materials. It also includes reducing negative impact on human health and environment during construction. Benefits of green building includes a reducing operating costs due to energy and water saving technology, improving public health since indoor air quality is usually higher and reducing environmental impacts by lessening storm water runoff and the heat island effect.
“Natural building” is an umbrella term than connotes any sort of building that is accomplished with the use of natural materials primarily, as opposed to the use of man-made or industrial materials. There is, of course, a blurring of this distinction when any specific material or building technique is examined, because the influence of technology is all-pervasive in today’s world. Still, it is worthwhile to focus on those ways of building that minimize the use of products that require considerable embodied energy for their manufacture or transportation. The objective is to build with simple techniques that don’t further pollute the environment, consume more fossil fuel, or unnecessarily extract the resources of Mother Earth. Such techniques, by their very nature, have an aesthetic value that tends to blend in with the environment and “feel” natural.
