To reduce the impact of the built environment on the natural environment, more and more countries have begun to promote green building. In order to better measure whether a building is a green building or not, many rating systems have emerged. The major ones are LEED in the United States, BREEAM in the UK, Green Mark in Singapore, and Green Star in Australia. These rating systems have different emphasis and different buildings will choose different systems for certification. But what they have in common is that, after these certifications, Within the public scope, these buildings will be recognized as green buildings.
Driven by policy incentives and economic benefits (tax cuts, propaganda effects, increased rents, etc.), more and more buildings have put the ‘green building’ as target. However, according to my actual observation, some certified green buildings are not running as expected.
For example, the Pixel building in Melbourne, which has triple certificate (BREEAM, LEED and Green Star) and has received high marks in all three rating systems. However, according to my field visit, the actual operation of the Pixel building is not as expected. The Pixel building’s rainwater recovery system did not work well, and the plants in the balcony garden where is supposed to use the rainwater to irrigated had dried up. The grass on the roof that used to recover rainwater is covered by tables and chairs, and the wind power facilities are not functioning properly. I believe this is not a separate phenomenon, the roof solar reflectors in Sydney’s central park are not operating as expected as well and the roof garden is overgrown and lacks of proper maintenance.
Understandably, any technologies needs practice to expose problems, and the problems also provides opportunities for improvement. Although the consideration of the importance of building operation and maintenance was lack in the initial design, more and more rating systems have begun to update the scoring standards or develop new rating systems for building operations and maintenance, which is good for further improvement.
Reference
KM Fowler, EM Rauch, JW Henderson, AR Kora – 2010,Re-assessing green building performance: A post occupancy evaluation of 22 GSA buildings’
‘why don’t green buildings live up to hype on energy efficiency’
https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-dont-green-buildings-live-up-to-hype-on-energy-efficiency
Green Star, https://new.gbca.org.au/green-star/
Pixel building, https://inhabitat.com/pixel-building-australias-first-carbon-neutral-building-is-now-complete/
Best Moving Forward 