Global Green News
ECO-FRIENDLY BUILDINGS
NEWSHOUR. APRIL 15, 2005
Jeffrey Kaye of KCET-Los Angeles reports on efforts to build environment-friendly buildings.
JEFFREY KAYE: Think about what harms the environment and the culprits that most likely come to mind are factories, power plants and cars, all belching pollutants. What probably isn't thought of as an environmental menace are America's more than 80 million commercial and residential buildings.
But whether they're soaring skyscrapers or suburban tract homes, buildings have a huge effect on the environment, say scientists, from the consumption of energy and the wasteful use of raw materials to the production of greenhouse gases.
ROB WATSON: Well, I believe that buildings are the worst thing that people do to the environment.
JEFFREY KAYE: Rob Watson is a senior scientist with the environmental group NRDC, The Natural Resources Defense Council.
ROB WATSON: Buildings use twice as much energy as cars and trucks. Seventy percent of the electricity in the United States is consumed by our homes and our office buildings.
JEFFREY KAYE: Because of their high energy consumption, buildings are indirectly responsible for air pollution, a third of the country's total carbon dioxide emissions and half of its sulfur dioxide emissions.
ROB WATSON: We don't associate the fact that when we turn on a light switch, coal is mined in a mine; it goes to a power plant that comes up the stack as acid rain producing sulfur dioxide, planet-cooking carbon dioxide. There's no direct connection between the environmental impact that the building causes and the damage is always somewhere else.
JEFFREY KAYE: In response to growing awareness of the building environment's effect on the natural environment, architects and builders, activists and government agencies are increasingly championing an alternative method of design and construction. It's an approach called green building.
The essence of green building is creating structures that are far more efficient in their consumption of energy and water, and less wasteful in their use of materials than conventional buildings. Once a movement on the architectural fringe, green design principles are starting to appear in everything from a new generation of government buildings and corporate offices to single family homes and apartment complexes.
