German Green Building Council Advances with Life-Cycle Assessment Tools for Rating Green Buildings
The German Sustainable Building Council is moving rapidly to develop its own green building rating system, the first that will really incorporate European Union directives for eco-design of building products, as well as to fit the continental building climate.
In meetings with founders of the German Sustainable Building Council (Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer nachhaltiges Bauen) in Frankfurt and Stuttgart in late November, I learned that the group is moving ahead with a technically-based approach to developing a green building rating system, as yet unnamed. While still small in numbers (less than 100 members) and very much in a start-up mode, it is my assessment that the German Council has the potential to become a large and influential player on the world green building stage, owing to a strong focus on energy conservation (including many examples of “zero net energy buildings) and a number of existing examples of outstanding sustainably designed buildings already in that country.
Under current plans, the “German LEED” will feature two elements unique to the current LEED system: a manufacturer-supplied life-cycle assessment of all building products based on Environmental Product Declarations, EPD (ISO 14025 and ISO 21930) and a “transparency” feature that will require certified buildings to estimate all life-cycle costs for building operations, including energy, water and cleaning costs. This moves beyond the “snapshot” requirements of the LEED system, to more of a “movie” of long-term building operations. This approach could take building design beyond merely estimating energy use, to requiring life-cycle operating costs as a standard reporting feature. In this way, reviewers would have a sounder basis for evaluating various buildings’ claims to ‘greenness.’
The group hopes that both of these measures, however difficult to implement at the beginning, will lead to better design decisions by building and construction teams and to more willingness by building owners to use technologies and systems that perform better over the long haul, but may have higher initial costs. (Both of these considerations are clearly directions in which the USGBC’s LEED system is also headed.) In the case of Germany, they also expect to secure manufacturers’ cooperation, because the larger 400-million-strong European Union is also heading rapidly in this direction. For more details, contact the group’s executive director, Anna Braune. The German Green Building Council expects to hold its first annual conference in June 2008 in Stuttgart.
Posted by on 12/02/2007 at 03:10 PM
