Does it make sense to build green at all?
Many builders argue the case, but is there a way they can see beyond?
The more these things about ‘green buildings’ are in the news, the more intriguing it seems to be getting for people in the profession, and those who seek to buy or lease building spaces.
You could be an individual aspiring for a home, or a corporate manager wanting to take a long-term lease of an office space while conscious of reducing costs of energy, water, air-conditioning, effective waste management, and such like.
Your need is born of a two-fold urge: you want to drive the best cost of the purchase while knowing that potentially the costs of maintenance have to be the least; and you want to fulfill a personal desire to make a ‘responsible’ decision in the context of the environment.
Well, that’s from a point of view of you being a customer of such buildings. What if you are a builder yourself and want to fulfill these two criteria — of efficient cost, and an environmentally responsible building that wins you the appreciation of your customer, your colleagues in the company and the world at large?
The preliminary business fears are of not wanting to take decisions on the project that are unfamiliar to you—whether it’s on management of water, energy or any other aspect. Said one prominent builder to me recently, “I have been building for 22 years. I have not seen the need for doing anything differently. Our sales are still brisk; the company enjoys a good reputation.”
I asked him, “Do you see that it’ll make sense for you to offer these benefits of no water scarcity in the apartment, power in homes that relies less on diesel and reduces the risk of power shutdowns?” His response was instant: “Let’s face it: the customer buys first on strength of location; his assessment of how the property will appreciate over some years; proximity to facilities like schools, hospitals, markets, railway station, or the airport. The kind of neighbours his family will have is also a factor.
“The customer today,” he went on as he chewed on the salad, “is confident that it is the government’s obligation to supply water and energy to the city residents. Few customers see this as an obligation from us as builders. As customers, they choose builders who have delivered good quality buildings; they go by advice from friends and by their own assessment of a builder’s reputation and trust. Green has only a marginal role.”
If benefits to customers of going green are obvious, why then are builders not taking that route, and why are customers saying no to buying properties that don’t offer those features? And as for the few who advertise and claim they are ‘green’, they are, in a sense, admitting that they do see ‘green’ is a pull factor in sales. Why then are they not actually doing all the things that go in to make a building green?
Well, for starters, what are ‘all the things’?!
There are many deterrents. For one thing, the industry is in a phase of transition from being a seller’s market to a buyer’s. There are not enough professional practitioners of architecture, or of experts in areas of water, sanitation, power management, and waste management, who are capable of going beyond the conventional and set practices of the last 50 years. And those who are good at it, have not done enough such buildings and so don’t have a ‘track record’ that assures a builder that he can adopt these new approaches. The risk of failure in execution keeps builders away from doing anything major.
Besides, sales for the builder are not affected too much by his not going green.
All the grim facts and stories are still not making an impact: buildings consume 35% of all energy generated every year [So what! is the laconic response]. Bricks and concrete blocks consume very high energy in manufacture. [That’s something the government should worry about. To me, it is practical. It is easy to get. Contractors know how to build with such materials.] The conventional generation of air-conditioners or washing machines are still heavy on energy use. [The customer says, I can afford the monthly extra energy cost. And the cost of these ACs is not forbidding. I have the money to buy the AC, and can afford the monthly extra cost.]. Microclimatic architecture and use of the right building materials can make homes cooler, thus avoiding ACs and sometimes fans, too. [I have not heard of anyone who does such things. And I am not sure if such buildings are reliable and enduring in the long-term, is the typical response.]
What needs to be first accepted is that these are inevitable shifts in building design over the next few years. As a builder, it’d be prudent to be pragmatic enough to ensure that house-owners don’t regret buying a house when they learn adopting certain practices can make the houses better, and expect the builder to install them. Some years later, customers will bring negative PR for the builder.
There is then another aspect. How do you go about the business of getting architects, consultants, and a builder-company’s own engineers to think in these new directions? The trick is to not make ‘green’ a fetish. You should not believe in the textbook approach to sustainability. You have to bear in mind that it has to be doable for others, too. It has to be replicable and sometimes scalable. If not, execution will pose challenges that will sour the customer experience, and the builder will take a beating on the market.
The safe road to take is to address the low-hanging fruits that are easier to pick both on demand- and supply-side management of aspects of water, energy, waste. Rainwater harvesting [it can help you harness 2.5 lakh liters of water for 1000 sq.ft. of terrace area. If done smartly and right [that’s the catch!] you can manage to meet nearly 6 months’ need of fresh water for a small family in a year]. Solar water heating [that saves nearly 40 percent of contracted energy demand for any house or apartment and so saves on capital cost for builder and clips energy bills every month of living there]. ‘Grow Your Own Water’ plans [that ensure you say no to municipal water supply, and avoid using borewells that are becoming increasingly unreliable], natural air-conditioning systems [that use just 30 percent of energy loads of regular ACs]. These are but a few examples of such strategic approaches any builder-company can take as part of routine process in the creation of homes or offices, or even hotels and hospitals.
If you get beyond these and want to achieve more, you can look for upstream carbon-effectiveness—use of non-river, sand-based concrete, triple-blend concrete, lighter building blocks, debris used for road subgrades, optimizing structural inputs for framed structures, establishing micro-climate right at the stage of design and not as an afterthought…. Again, there is a good deal of smart value-engineering you can bring to the building, save resources, and save money, too.
At BCIL with ZED, or zero-energy developed homes, the work on such stewardship has been at the level of our own organisation, and our extended families of ZED home-owners, which is growing by the hundreds every passing year. As an organisation, we are constantly greening the supply chain ranging from simple administrative needs of stationery, office furniture, and such to purchase of materials for projects, for the company’s cafeteria, or waste segregation for all our residential communities. Above all this is the input we generate constantly in design terms.
We are not inventors. We are more of system integrators in innovation processes that we refine with continuing improvement programmes for building management systems.
The trick is to build your company’s strengths in areas of localized generation of energy, effective water management, and systems for responsible recycle, up-cycle, or disposal of waste. The aim should be to reduce, if not eliminate, dependence [as builders of homes] on city civic infrastructure for water and energy. You can create whole apartment blocks without formal connections from municipal agencies for water, sewerage water, energy, and waste. You can be on the road to achieving full autonomy on all these three vital resources for urban living.
One lesson you will do well to bear in mind: don’t be inflexible and ‘puristic’ in your approach to design of urban settlements. The bottom line is: does the market accept the idea and buy in?
We also realised we have a huge constraint of no formal education in many skill-sets that the construction sector requires. One way of mitigating this risk is to train our engineers in supervision, and increase the depth of management autonomy. They will need continuing improvement programmes and knowledge updates. If you are an individual wanting to build green, look for an architect who is certified or trained in these areas by organizations like the Indian Green Business Council.
Asking questions at every stage, and value-engineering their responses according to our self-evolved sustainability norms is a serious challenge. You learn that over time and with experience. It is a slow process, though enduring and satisfying if you like that journey.
