Looking after the environment is everyone's responsibility
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Stephen John, Research Fellow, Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering, University of Canterbury, New Zealand points out the benefits of environmentally-friendly, energy efficient and cost-effective New Zealand pine.
The construction industry in India is one of the most rapidly growing sectors and contributes significantly to the economy. It is growing at a rate of 9.2% against the world average of 5.5%.
Increasingly there is interest among builders to opt for green construction to obtain a better Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating. This can be perceived as a thought-process shift, wherein the companies are looking at the long term benefits of green construction.
Though the concept has been practiced extensively in more developed countries, India has recently woken up to this concept.
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the central pillar of the Indian Green Building Council or IGBC, plays an active role in promoting sustainability in the construction sector. The IGBC has licensed the LEED green building standard from the US Green Building Council and is responsible for certifying LEED-New Construction and LEED-Core and Shell buildings in India.
All other projects are certified through the US Green Building Council. Along with the construction industry, several architects too are adopting green building techniques.
CII-IGBC recently announced that Shree Ram Urban Infrastructure - a developer - is attempting the first ever LEED Platinum rating (Core & Shell) in India and will be the first ever residential building in the world to do so. Palais Royale will be located in Worli, Mumbai, with an estimated height of over 1000 ft.
The projected growth potential for green buildings in India is shown in the following table:
From humble beginnings of 20,000 sq ft of green footprint in 2003, to a staggering 70 million sq ft to date, green buildings are well poised to reach heights in India.
Today, a variety of green building projects are coming up in the country - residential complexes, exhibition centres, hospitals, educational institutions, laboratories, IT parks, airports, government buildings and corporate offices. This has compelled the Indian materials and equipment manufacturers to seriously look at green features to meet the growing demand for green buildings.
Most construction companies are trying to increase their LEED ratings through various product features such as use of flyash, energy efficient windows and use of recycled materials for construction. Although these products effectively give a construction project higher LEED rating, it follows the letter of the Kyoto Protocol rather than the spirit of it.
True, green construction would be through the use of sustainable products for construction which would effectively aide the sustainability of the environment. New Zealand has one such product to assist – New Zealand Pine.
It has the unique characteristic of being both green and sustainable to the environment, giving a higher rating to the construction project, and at the same time not harming the ecology. New Zealand pine is environmentally-friendly, energy efficient and a cost-effective alternative to threatened native and tropical forests in India.
Green, with hints of steel
From a green perspective, wood building materials have much less embodied energy (energy required to manufacture building materials) compared to other materials. The biggest advantage of using wood is the opportunity to recover solar energy from wood waste – a significantly greater plus point than both the benefits of stored carbon and the low embodied energy in wood materials.
The solar energy which has been stored in the wood for a few years can then be used in place of fossil fuels. Better still, wood waste can come from all stages of harvesting and processing, construction and demolition of timber buildings.
A simulation was conducted by the University of Canterbury New Zealand to investigate the use of concrete, steel, and wood as the main construction material for the sub-structure, super-structure and finishes in a commercial building.
The project looked at how green and sustainable different building materials are, and involved three six-storey building design projects with concrete, steel, or wood. The aim of the project was to look at the influence of materials on the life cycle energy use and CO2 emissions of the buildings.
For the steel and timber buildings, the objective was to use as much of the material as possible in the structure and finishes. Many interior and exterior finishing materials were kept constant. External cladding on the timber building was fibre cement.
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