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Can a 10,000 square foot house really be green? Is a hybrid GMC Yukon SUV an oxymoron? At what point does the alleged greenness of something go from truly being green to mere greenwashing?

The environmental bandwagon is getting crowded as more and more people recognize the benefits and importance of going green. Sometimes it is out of a genuine sense of commitment to green principles. But sometimes it is just marketing.

Green houses are one area where this is becoming an issue. Houses which many people would consider oversized behemoths are being touted for their supposed greenness. In a recent article, Jetson Green pointed out the absurdity of a 9,800 square foot house in Larkspur, Colorado being called a "green" building. A couple of weeks ago, when I attended a GM-sponsored event (along with David Anderson), I test-drove a 2008 GMC Yukon Hybrid. How truly green are these?

A new LEED for Homes standard is coming out later this year. One contentious issue is that LEED-H factors in the size of the house in program in a way that will penalize larger houses and require them to earn additional points in order to obtain LEED certification due to their larger size.

The USGBC has taken a very important step by setting the LEED-H standards so that builders cannot easily "greenwash" bigfoot houses. An example 15,000 square foot house in Florida that Lloyd Alter discussed had to earn an additional 26 points to achieve the same certification as an average-size house with a typical square-foot-to-bedroom ratio.

In many ways, LEED is about having a badge of status, rather than about building a green building. There were environmentally-sensitive buildings built before LEED was even introduced. There are buildings that incorporate green features that are not LEED certified. LEED is as much a marketing tool as it is a method for building green buildings. But if the builders and the owners want to ausuage their guilt about having an excessively large house, while they certainly can (and should) still build it as green as possible, LEED will not provide an easy shield to hide behind.

LEED-H offsets the requirement thresholds for its certification levels by raising the number of points needed for a larger home and reducing the number of points needed for a smaller home. The baseline figures are:

• 2 bedroom house 1430 square feet
• 3 bedroom house 1950 square feet
• 4 bedroom house 2400 square feet
• 5 bedroom house 2600 square feet
• and 200 square feet for each additional bedroom.

When I test drove the Yukon, I was initially somewhat unimpressed. Having been paying so much attention to higher efficiency vehicles for so long, 21 MPG seems abysmally poor to me, though I have since found that a Toyota Camry V6 has the same combined efficiency. But to put it in comparison with the scale for house size, the full-size SUV, big as it is, seems less of a monstrosity than the gigantic McMansions do.

If the Prius, with a 1254 kilogram curb weight, corresponds with an efficient, 1270 square foot (7 point LEED-H bonus adjustment) 3-bedroom house, then the Yukon, with a 2513 kilogram curb weight would correspond with a 2550 square foot (5 point LEED-H penalty) house. That’s within the realm of reasonableness. It’s not so far out of scale with what an ordinary family might need or use to render the hybrid features an absurd affectation. For comparison, that 15,000 square foot house corresponds fairly well with a 40-foot Winnebago motor home (15,500 kilograms).

Relative size is a factor to consider when evaluating the greenness of anything. There may be any number of good, valid reasons to have something that is larger than average. Lots of good homes can be built with green features that fall within the guidelines of LEED-H. LEED, after all, stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. A 15,000 square foot house may be green, but it is not leading; it is not setting an example for other green homes. And unless it meets a higher standard in many other ways, it certainly does not deserve LEED certification.

Links:
USGBC LEED-H Draft (pdf)
Jetson Green
Lloyd Alter in TreeHugger

image source: Wikimedia

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.

"It is a “net-zero energy use” home, meaning over the course of a year, its photovoltaic panels will track the sun and are projected to generate more electricity than the home will consume. The panels will generate power every day, but in winter, its power mix will rely more on the local utility; in summer it will generate and return excess power to the grid." -Earth Advantage

The house is designed to capitalize on passive solar heating. This feature also orients it for views of nearby Mount Hood. Additional heating is provided with in-floor radiant heat in the concrete slab floors. The roof uses structural insulated panels (SIPs) which are extremely efficient. The house is also Energy-Star certified, with high-efficiency appliances throughout.The Neil Kelly Company's website has a gallery of photographs with many more pictures of the house.via: Jetson Green, Earth Advantage, and Hood River News