Sustainable Facilities Tool

What is Sustainability

Sustainability is best thought of as a process, rather than a thing. US Executive Order 13423 states that sustainability “means to create and maintain conditions, under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations.” In order to achieve such conditions, new ways of designing, constructing and operating buildings and facilities must be identified.

Related Topics

Green Building

Green buildings are those that are efficient, comfortable, healthy, durable and adaptable over time. They meet the needs of the occupants that live and work in them in a way that minimizes demand for natural resources and reduces or eliminates waste. Green buildings save energy, water, materials, protect the indoor environment and are designed to evolve as occupant needs change.

Integrative Design Process

Finding solutions that meet all of these goals at once isn’t always easy, so new processes are required to help achieve those goals.  The integrative design process is a great way to do this. Integrative thinking looks for synergies among strategies – strategies that enhance one another.  It also looks for strategies that, taken together, reduce costs. To make this process effective:

• Start early —Setting sustainability goals at the outset and incorporating sustainable alternatives from the beginning means avoiding design changes and change orders down the road
• Form an interdisciplinary team —Sustainability means finding new and creative solutions that cross disciplinary boundaries. Bring a diverse team together to work alongside each other in new ways to find integrated strategies for improved performance. For example, include the contractor in the design process to make sure their expertise is shared, and integrate building users and other stakeholders into the team to make sure that their needs are met.
• Use charrettes -Charrettes are integrative workshops designed to promote creativity and collaboration. They should be facilitated by an experienced facilitator and should include the project team, the owner, and other stakeholders. The first charrette is typically used to generate project goals and guiding principles. Additional charrettes can be used to tackle the overall project plan or aspects of design.
• Set clear goals —By making sustainability criteria explicit at the beginning of a project, teams have a clear direction of what their work is meant to achieve. These goals should be revisited throughout the project to keep things on track. Documents such as the Owner’s Project Requirements can be used to memorialize project goals and provide a frame of reference for on-going evaluation.
• Observe the system —Before any design decisions are made, it is important to understand the system as a whole and how the pieces fit together. This may require collection of data on energy or water use in an existing building, or surveys of occupants working in a space. The more that the specific place and the components of the system are understood, the more effective integrative design strategies will be.
• Evaluate alternatives —Sustainable design requires careful evaluation of alternatives against multiple criteria. It is not enough to determine which materials cost least up front, but also which will perform the best, are the healthiest, will have the greatest return on investment, are the most efficient, use resources the most wisely, etc. This process may require a simple comparison, or more advanced analysis such as energy modeling.
• Verify performance —As a project moves from design to implementation and operation, it is important to continue tracking performance against the project goals and to continually refine those goals in order to ensure that performance targets are achieved. Performance tracking can be leveraged to create continuous improvement.

Life Cycle Approach

Materials and resources all have environmental, social and economic impacts beyond their use in a project. For a material, impacts occur during harvest or extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, transporting, installing, using and ultimately discarding (or hopefully reusing or recycling). These “cradle to cradle” impacts should be considered when purchasing materials. The formal study of this process is known as Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).

Similarly, Life Cycle Costing examines the costs and savings throughout the life cycle.  For example, energy efficient equipment and appliances can be more expensive when initially purchased but will save energy (and money) throughout the life of the project. Therefore, it may make sense to invest in more efficient equipment that costs more up front but saves money and energy over time.

The Sustainable Facilities Tool allows you to compare life cycle costs for materials, as well as other environmental criteria, by following the green dots and clicking "compare materials" in Explore Sustainable Workspaces.

Triple Bottom Line

One way to move toward sustainability is to focus on the triple bottom line of People, Profit, and Planet. In other words, all projects should make sense socially, environmentally and economically. By moving away from the idea that any of these aspects needs to be sacrificed to meet the others, and striving toward solutions with all of these benefits and more, we will begin to create environments that last over time, withstand stress, replenish instead of deplete resources, save money, improve productivity, and keep people healthy.

Whole Building Systems Thinking

Unlike conventional design processes, where components and disciplines are treated separately, sustainable design requires an evaluation of whole systems. When retrofitting an office, consider the space as a whole. This means thinking not only about the lighting, the flooring, the windows, the HVAC system, and the furniture as separate components, but also thinking about the relationship between each of these components and the ways that those relationships create the space, and how that fits with sustainability goals.

Check out the Whole Building Systems section in Explore for information on building systems, their relationships to one another, and the integrative team necessary to reach sustainability goals.

For example, if a project’s goal is to save energy from lighting and improve occupant comfort, it should think not only about the type of lighting fixtures needed, but also how the space will be used by the occupants, the amount of sunlight streaming through the windows at different times of year, how that light gets bounced into the space, how the light levels are controlled, and even the colors of the walls. By thinking holistically about the lighting system, rather than simply about the lighting components, a more comfortable, efficient, healthy and productive space can be created. In addition, the project “system” is nested within larger systems, such as a watershed, an air shed, a forest, a neighborhood and city, and so forth; these larger systems should also be considered.