From the Editor
Last week, the green building community gathered in Toronto for the U.S. Green Building Council's annual Greenbuild Conference and Expo. It’s been interesting to see how the focus of the show has evolved over the last several years. Before the market crashed in 2008, it was decidedly a new construction show – most of the attendees were architects and most of the exhibits and educational sessions focused on design and build products and topics.

Over the last few years, the recession has forced a shift to existing building renovations, since no one was building new. And now, as economic uncertainty persists, the focus at Greenbuild seems to be not just on renovating existing buildings sustainably, but ensuring that those existing buildings perform well over the long term.

Several exhibitors were showing new sustainability dashboard products, as more and more facility managers find these tools useful — whether showing sustainability performance on a computer screen in the FM’s office or in the lobby of a high-rise building. As we know, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.  But you also can’t manage what you don’t analyze, and these dashboards make it easier to run reports and analyze performance.

In addition to the products in the exhibit hall, dozens of Greenbuild educational sessions focused on how to evaluate performance — from occupant surveys to case studies of supposedly green buildings that didn’t perform initially, but then did after some tuning and tweaking. The Christman Building in Lansing, Mich. is a prime example. A gut rehab of the 1927 building was certified Platinum with LEED Core and Shell. The builder, Christman Company, also occupies three floors, and certified its own space at Platinum with LEED for Commercial Interiors. When the building opened, its Energy Star score was 35 and it was using a staggeringly high 135 kBtu/sqft/yr. After some tweaking and tuning, and by using LEED for Existing Buildings as its guide, Christman improved its Energy Star score to 81 by last June. And, it received a Platinum certification with LEED-EB, making it the first triple-LEED-Platinum building.

Did you attend Greenbuild? Did you also notice the focus on existing building performance? Are you also heartened by this trend?

Cheers,

Greg Zimmerman, editor  

Green Strategies
Learning To Be Green

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