KEY POINTS:
How green is that? As unlikely as it may seem, buyers of anything from cars to clothing may in future have the building industry to thank for knowing how green their options are.
Nothing we humans do affects the environment like the buildings we build, live, work and play in. Depending on whose statistics you believe, buildings consume just over half the world's energy, much of it in making the building products and constructing the buildings in the first place.
The New Zealand Green Building Council's Green Star rating system recognises the need for building greener if we are to save the planet. With one five star building completed and others under development, it's a start.
But if each of us, all 4.2 million in New Zealand or six billion odd globally, is to do our bit, it's going to be achieved in smaller human-scale "bites". We need to know the environmental provenance (origin) and performance of the things we buy every day if we're going to make a real difference.
As architects we are only too aware of this. There are, after all, more than 100,000 building products to choose from, and they have differing levels of "greenness".
It's great to see a small revolution under way in "human-scale smaller bites" in our industry. More interesting still is that, with time, the experiences of the building industry should be repeated in other main categories of consumables, from the cars we drive to the clothing we wear and the food we eat.
What's happening? The manufacturers and distributors of building products are willingly opening themselves to close and independent environmental scrutiny, paying to have their products assessed for their environmental impact and listed online on sites such as greenbuild.co.nz.
Perhaps because of buildings' impact on the environment, the industry is seeing the light earlier than most in this regard. As a result, people who recommend their products can understand the products' provenance - the energy and raw material resources required to make and transport them. It's giving a means of independently measuring, assessing and verifying such products' short and longer term environmental impact, their durability and recyclability.
Product manufacturers and distributors are learning to see public examination of their products' green-ness not as a threat and are accepting that architects, specifiers, builders and property owners need this information for their purchasing decisions.
In a growing number of cases, buyers are basing their purchasing decision on the products' environmental characteristics, where other things such as price and effectiveness are equal.
In fact, "environmental awareness is not going away, it's growing and we'd better be part of it" is a growing mantra among manufacturers. Some have a long history of greening their product lines - others are newer to the game.
Examples include a company which has long produced commercial carpet in small squares (tiles). That means worn or stained sections can be discarded without wasting unaffected areas.
Another company recycles old carpet into new, and covers the cost of carbon emissions throughout the manufacturing process, from extracting and transporting raw materials, manufacturing, distributing, installing, maintaining and recycling the carpet.
Yet another company has found a way of making windows that avoid any loss of a building's thermal performance, unlike traditional glass.
Using translucent panels, the company fills a space with diffused natural daylight thanks to the millions of prismatic glass fibres which refract sunlight.
In essence, we are about to see a profusion of Greenbuild.co.nz equivalents. This means helping consumers of anything from food to transport or clothing to understand the implications of their purchasing decisions - its provenance, sustainability and its recyclability.
With all the concern and fear of environmental degradation, this trend is an environmental win/win - and a cause for optimism for our futures.
* Gordon Moller is an architect and chairman of Greenbuild Ltd.
