Ten years ago, the idea of winning acceptance for green buildings represented a big challenge. In hindsight, green design seems more like it was an opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of. Green buildings bring real benefits, not just to the environment, but also to the people who use them and the organizations that own them. Those benefits are so evident that the performance of individual green buildings has raised expectations for all buildings — including existing buildings.
Progress in greening the vast stock of old and not-so-old buildings has come far more slowly than gains in new construction. In 2009 alone, 1,081 buildings earned certification under the LEED for New Construction rating system. But only 275 gained LEED for Existing Buildings certification, despite the far larger number of existing buildings.
LEED certification isn’t the only measure of progress, but the gap between those two numbers tells us something about the scale of the challenge, and the opportunity, ahead of us.
How fast we seize that opportunity depends largely on the facility management community. No one else has the knowledge or incentive to put in the hard work it will take to capture the gains — from operating cost savings to improvements in occupant satisfaction to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — that a deep greening of existing buildings can bring.
Some facility managers have been leaders in the green building movement, and many more have adopted individual measures that, cumulatively, have helped advance green technology and design. So let’s take a moment to pat ourselves on our collective back.
Now let’s kick ourselves in our collective backside and get going.