One quarter billion dollars is a lot. An awful lot. Most people will never even come near that amount of money, but that’s what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Americans saved this past year by switching over to energy efficient homes.

In the EPA’s announcement on July 3, it was reported that 17 percent of all single family homes built across the nation in the year 2008 received the EPA’s Energy Star approval rating, which means that a homes are at least 15 percent more energy efficient than homes built to the 2004 International Residential Code (IRC), and include additional energy-saving features that typically make them 20–30 percent more efficient than standard homes. The percentage of Energy Star homes was up from 12 percent in 2007.

The increase in Energy Star rated homes shows that home builders and home buyers are investing in homes that save money and the environment. “Every year more Americans decide to cut their energy bills and help keep the air clean in their communities by buying a new home that has earned EPA’s Energy Star,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

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Erica and her husband are shopping for granite countertops, and Erica is asking questions about radiation. They are both “serious cooks”, and they have two young children. They do not want any chance of increased radiation in their kitchen, but Erica found that granite showrooms do not welcome her questions.

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Jim Lee thought he had asbestos panels in his laundry room.  When he bought his home last year, the property inspector flagged fibrous panels behind the washer and drier as possible “asbestos containing material”.  Jim called three different asbestos remediation companies for estimates.

Jim asked me for advice on selecting the best remediation company.  I did some environmental testing when Jim bought the home, and he respected my opinion.  I asked to see the lab report on the suspect material.

Jim did not have a lab report.  Not one of the remediation companies sent a sample to a laboratory.  All THREE inspectors claimed they could identify asbestos just by looking at it.  At that point, I knew all three companies were unethical.

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That’s the impetus behind “Playa” (above), a case study green home being built in Westchester, Calif., by Go Green Construction. The house, admittedly, will be huge — 4,300 square feet huge, to be exact — and located in a neighborhood that’s not particularly public transit-friendly. On the other hand, Playa’s also pre-rated for LEED platinum, serving as a self-described “living laboratory of green design” in a neighborhood full of ungreen McMansions.

The rooftop view from Playa (left) alone shows the need for green building in this neighborhood, where smoggy haze floats above multi-story single family homes. In contrast to the massive footprints of its neighbors, Playa will boast a full solar array, graywater recycling system, living walls, and smart house automation which allows residents to control the power of the house remotely.

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It seems everyone is “going modular” these days with the rapid growth in the movement of green prefab design and construction. The buzz in modular construction is causing a rush of new designs, innovative products, and advanced modular systems being introduced. The goal of prefab is still the same as minimizing waste while maximizing efficiency. To learn more about prefab design and what makes it a compelling form of green building, please click here.

No longer are the days when just calling yourself a prefab company is considered environmentally progressive. Homes are now being made from materials like reused shipping containers, recycled steel, and certified sustainably-harvested wood. The new challenge for prefab companies is balancing the economics of innovative sustainable design with the realities of construction and raw material costs.

We want to highlight some companies doing some very interesting work in the prefab space.

Envision Prefab shows their commitment to the environment by attempting to maintain a zero carbon footprint in both manufacturing and production of their models. Their e-House reuses shipping containers transformed into seamless interior spaces, while including a laundry list of green systems such as tankless water heaters, solar panels, and LED lighting.

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A generation ago, that much square footage would have built a comfortable four-plex in which four families would have lived. Today, it is likely that this house will be occupied by a family of four.

To be truly green, the house cannot be thought of as a mere building whose impacts on the world stop three feet out from the face of the outside walls, but must take into consideration the impacts of the resources that will be consumed by dwelling in the house, as well. Life cycle, manner of use, and supporting infrastructure required are also matters that need to be examined.

The Audubon Society built one of the first explicitly green buildings in the country when they built a new headquarters building for themselves in the early 1990s. Rather than building a new structure on a greenfield site surrounded by trees and a lush lawn, they instead chose to renovate an existing 19th century building in downtown New York City. This choice allowed the use of existing infrastructure for building services and transportation, as well as the recycling of an existing structure and the savings of thousands of tons of material.

A new house built out in the exurbs quickly outweighs any green benefits it may have with the miles of roads that are built to reach the house and connect it to the existing grid of roads. The miles of travel required to travel between this house and the stores, workplaces and other places its inhabitants must go to quickly offset any potential benefits of greener construction for the house itself.

Some years ago, ISO 9000 quality management was all the rage in industry, but it only addressed the manufacturing process and following standards and procedures. It did nothing to address the fundamental quality of what was being produced. Within the system, it was completely possible to produce ISO 9000-compliant concrete life-jackets.

We need to encourage more rigorous expectations for terming something green. Lloyd Alter has written a couple of recent articles for TreeHugger touching on this same theme both for houses as well as for new commercial building. It’s a positive sign that more and more people are recognizing the value that green building labels offer. But, along with that, we are also seeing more and more cases like this where things are being little more than greenwashed by promoters who are trying to, as Lloyd so poetically put it, put lipstick on a pig.

Standards and systems such as LEED, Green Globes, Energy Star, and BuildAmerica can be used to improve the construction of a building as compared to a baseline standard, but the baseline is a pretty low standard. It is a tragedy that Energy Star is seen as a badge of distinction rather than being a requirement for all new construction. As Randy Croxton, the architect for the Audubon House renovation said, a building built to code only means that it is meeting the minimum standard. If you did anything less, it would be an illegal building.

The LEED for Homes final release version is reported to have a formula that will penalize “bigfoot” houses that are beyond a certain size by reducing the credit for each improvement, making it harder for such buildings to become LEED certified. A house that is 20% larger than the allowable size would only get 80% credit for each point of improvement within the system. This will help improve the credibility of the LEED-H standard and make it harder for outsize houses to be greenwashed with the LEED system.

Green building needs to be more about a wholesale approach to how the building is built and consideration about all of the impacts that the building has on the environment. It should be less about whether or not some labeling system can be gamed enough for it to earn a particular label.