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What Makes a Green Home
A green home incorporates smart design, technology, construction and maintenance elements to significantly lessen the negative impact of the home on the environment and improve the health of the people who live inside. No matter your location or living situation, the opportunities for living a greener life at home are limited only by your imagination.
Making your home a greener place is a commitment – to yourself, your family, your community and the world. But more than that, it is a learning process. As exciting new technologies, products and scientific breakthroughs constantly emerge, staying educated on the hows – as well as the whys – of maintaining a green home is the best way to ensure your efforts are as effective and beneficial as possible.
Green Home Defined
A green home uses less energy, water and natural resources, creates less waste and is healthier for the people living inside compared to a standard home. It’s as simple as that!
A home can be built green, or you can make it green later. A green makeover can happen all at once, or it can be a gradual process. But what it all comes down to is a new way of thinking – and a new way of living. From a more energy-efficient kitchen to a tree-filled backyard paradise, your home can be green top to bottom, front to back, inside and out. And it doesn’t matter whether you rent or own, live in an apartment or single-family home, or live in the city, the suburbs or the country.
Green Home Renovations
The American Society of Interior Designers’ Foundation and the U.S. Green Building Council have partnered on the development of best practice guidelines and targeted educational resources for sustainable residential improvement projects.
This program will increase understanding of sustainable renovation project practices and benefits among homeowners, residents, design professionals, product suppliers and service providers to build both demand and industry capacity.
Downlad the Free REGREEN Guidelines Now! (PDF)
What is LEED?
The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.
LEED is a third-party certification program and an internationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. It provides building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings’ performance.
LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health:
- sustainable site development
- water efficiency
- energy efficiency
- materials selection
- indoor environmental quality
Credits and Prerequisites are organized into these five categories. An additional category, Innovation & Design Process, addresses sustainable building expertise as well as design measures not covered under these five environmental categories.
Certain rating systems include additional relevant categories. LEED Canada for Homes, for instance, includes a Location and Linkages category and an Awareness and Education category.
Certification is based on the total point score achieved, following an independent review and an audit of selected Credits. With four possible levels of certification (certified, silver, gold and platinum), LEED® is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of green building strategies that best fit the constraints and goals of particular projects.
The Canadian rating systems are an adaptation of the US Green Building Council's (USGBC) LEED Green Building Rating System, tailored specifically for Canadian climates, construction practices and regulations. The rating systems are adapted to the Canadian market through an inclusive process that engages stakeholders and experts representing the various sectors of the Canadian industry.
GREEN UP Program
In parallel with the technical adaptation and development of LEED Canada, national pilot projects are being conducted to engage market sectors in the performance management system in order to establish performance metrics and baselines, and put existing buildings on track towards LEED certification.
With ever-increasing numbers of building owners and homeowners engaging in this initiative, and reporting their energy and water use and progress towards certification, the CaGBC is creating a large, dynamic building performance database and information system for entire building sectors. This will allow reporting on energy and emissions, conservation potential and trends, performance and design standards, and actual and planned investment in building improvements.
Through the CaGBC building performance management system, owners and managers will be able to go online and take a structured, standardized approach to:
- record and monitor energy and water use and greenhouse gas emissions;
- assess the energy and environmental performance of all their buildings, including carbon footprint and conservation potential;
- identify and plan energy and environmental improvements using LEED templates;
- obtain performance metrics and design standards to improve design of new buildings;
- access training to guide staff in achieving and maintaining high performance;
- assess their LEED scores, and put their buildings on track towards certification.
The first three pilots being conducted through 2008 involve:
- over 60 commercial office buildings
- 340 K-12 schools
- over 80 administrative buildings from federal, provincial and municipal governments as well as utility companies
Additional pilots will be initiated during the coming years to address other building types, and the building performance management system will eventually apply to any building in Canada.
