Green Design 

  Seventh Generation - October 06 

Of all the environmental buzzwords floating around these days, "green design" is perhaps the most difficult to pin down with a clear definition. Does it mean constructing homes and buildings which use less energy? Or simply use less of everything? Is it referring to products that are safer and healthier to use? Or those made from more sustainable materials? The short answer is… yes! Green design can refer to anything from a product to a building that’s been designed with a reduced environmental impact of one kind or another in mind.

The most common usage of the term, however, refers to homes and other structures that employ various strategies to lessen their total environmental effects on both the people who inhabit them and the larger world itself. Here’s a look at the three essential elements that green design embraces:

Energy Efficient Design and Materials

One of the key aspects of green design involves energy conservation. This important goal can be achieved in any number of ways. For example, a building may be positioned to take best advantage of passive solar energy, or the sun’s natural heating. Or it might have thicker walls, and air-tight windows and doors for enhanced insulation. Inside, it might use natural light or high-efficiency fixtures and bulbs to illuminate with less electricity. Heating and cooling systems would take advantage of new technologies like heat exchangers and high efficiency motors, and be used less as other design elements decrease the need for climate control.

Recycled and Sustainable Materials

Most homes have traditionally been built from and filled with things made from largely unsustainable virgin materials like petroleum-based plastics, non-renewable minerals and ores, and forest-derived wood products. Green design seeks to replace these and other undesirable elements with recycled or sustainably produced alternatives. This concept covers everything from walls made of mud, straw, or even old bottles and earth-filled tires to interior furnishings made from bamboo and other fast-growing plantation woods. Also of great interest to green designers and architects are the new generation of “woods” made from recycled plastic, as well as lumber and other previously used materials reclaimed from dismantled structures.

Healthier Materials

Because green buildings are usually as air tight as possible in order to conserve energy, the materials used inside them take on paramount importance. This is because many modern materials from the pressed composite woods used in cabinetry to the chemicals used in synthetic carpeting emit small amounts of toxic fumes as they age. This process is called out- or off-gassing. Because of the outgassing issue, green designers prefer to use as many natural and untreated materials as possible in the interiors of their buildings in order to keep indoor air clean and healthy. Solid woods, natural fibres, untreated fabrics, low or no-fume paints and stains, non-toxic construction materials and other safer, healthier resources replace traditional materials and their accompanying burden of potential chemical hazards.

Today, the development of improved technologies and the emergence of new ideas is helping the field of green design grow by leaps and bounds. Whether applied to new construction or retrofitted into existing buildings, even ordinary homes and structures are beginning to employ green elements in certain aspects of their creation and maintenance as more and more people realize their advantages. In fact, the day is probably not far off when every house will be as green as the world it calls home.