Green Building Components and Applications |
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"Green Building" has developed quite the momentum as of late, and rightfully so. It is composed of a lot of good ideas "whose time has come". Green Building has several component parts or areas of application. A list of those areas would include: the Indoor Air Quality, the Thermal Performance, the amount and type of Resources needed, and the Embodied Energy of the materials used to build the house. Indoor Air Quality mostly refers to the off-gassing of chemicals and vapors by the various building products used in the house, the quantified concentration of these chemicals (like formaldehyde) and the time period they are expected to remain in those concentrations. It also includes the systems in place to control, condition, and filter the air inside the home. The Thermal Performance of the home is about how much energy is required to operate for the comfort of the occupants. This discussion includes the insulation, vapor and air barriers, the efficiency of appliances using electricity, and the use of passive and active solar heating, and photovoltaic or other "renewable" energy source electricity production. The Embodied Energy of the Resources includes the amount of energy or other resources used in the manufacture of the particular material, the amount of transportation needed to get the product to its end use location, the amount of clean-up and waste generated, the ability of the material to be recycled, the amount of landfill required to accommodate it at the end of its life-cycle, the "hazard" to the environment and employees of handling the material. Also, not neatly tucked into one of the categories is how much water is used by the home and whether there are systems for wastewater reclamation or for capturing rainwater. All of this leads into the broader category of "Sustainable Living" which begins to ask questions about how we produce and distribute our food, how much time and transportation is required for work and other activities, and how much of the money we spend every day stays in the community. It asks how all systems are related to and interconnected with each other and what are the hidden costs not being factored in to the equation. At Tierra Concepts we have been working with these concepts and applications for many years. Let us help you decide on the best approach to include sustainability for your design goals. |
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| Article Source: http://business2u.co.za | ||||
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