Overlooked Benefits of Green Building

Hello, and welcome to my first official blog post! Today I will be discussing my takeaways about a topic that really fascinates me, green building, from the online course, Renewable Energy and Green Building Entrepreneurship, taught by Dr. Chris Wedding of Duke University. 

Prior to taking the course, I recognized the positive environmental impacts of the ever-expanding field of green building, such as lower carbon emissions, less water usage, higher energy efficiency, and less overall energy consumption. It didn't shock me when Dr. Wedding explained that the financial benefits, rather than the positive environmental impacts were the main driver of the rapid growth in green building projects (but that's for another time).

One often overlooked aspect of green building that surprised me, were the benefits to the health and well-being of staff working in these green buildings. Green building offices are often called "healthy" office spaces because of key design features which increase staff productivity and loyalty to their company, as well as reducing the number of sick days that workers take. The higher loyalty of happy and healthy staff working in green buildings, is an aspect of green that can be worth the investment for a company, which is most probably the reason for the higher occupancy of green buildings compared to traditional buildings. The graphic below from the World Green Building Council's 2016 report Building the Business Case: Health, Wellbeing, and Productivity in Green Offices outlines these elements of certain green buildings providing these benefits.

Credit: https://www.worldgbc.org/sites/default/files/WGBC_BtBC_Dec2016_Digital_Low-MAY24_0.pdf

I found the effects of such small design features of green buildings in any type of space to be incredible, such as in hospitals, where patients see quicker recovery times or schools where students often receive better results on tests.

I thought what many people initially think when it comes to the economics of green building, that they are expensive and provide less return on investment. I was surprised when Dr. Wedding presented the statistic explaining the explosion of new green building projects all over the world in the last few years, the perceived additional cost of green building over regular construction is 15%, when in reality the extra cost ranges from 4% or even down to 0%. He also explained that green buildings have higher rent, sales, and occupancy rates compared to regular buildings, which also surprised me.

Overall, I am glad that green building is becoming more mainstream all over the world and with that, more and more people can experience their benefits. I only payed attention to the environmental benefits of green building, and until now, never fully realized the economic and especially the health benefits that they entail.

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