Buildings are said to use one-third of all the electricity created. They also gobble up hard materials by the millions of tons and control our living and working environment. They are so important that many organizations have devoted much thought to their design.

There are green building design organizations by the score. Search for them on the web. But the foremost organization is called the United States Green Building Council which publishes the LEED standards. Here is how Architectural Week describes them:

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. They are a set of routes to a way to make housing more efficient for producer and end user and in maintenance over the life of the building. The target is not wasting, and using what sun and water you get naturally, instead of shunting them away. Ideally a structure adds more oxygen than the C02 it produces, even in the use of equipment and materials. The emphasis is on limiting impact on resources and maximizing beautiful design for a space that is more ergonomic to live and work in.

LEED is measured by these criteria,
Sustainable Site
Water Efficiency
Energy and Atmosphere
Materials and Resources
Indoor Air Quality
Innovation and Design Process

The top score for a building is 69. The score determines the ranking of Certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum

The LEED rules are innovative, far reaching and effective. They are referenced in green designs over and over. They cover many principles that do not flow overtly from a Zero Waste strategy (even though the avoidance of waste is a pervasive subtext). Yet they are not based on Zero Waste principles but on recycling principles. Therefore they fail some important Zero Waste tests, because they rely on wasteful recycling methods. At the time they were developed, the creators had only the recycling perspective to make use of but now there is a need for a more advanced view.

When green building depends on the recycling of materials it accepts a low level reuse strategy. The concrete, plaster and other heavy materials are not conserved as completed forms but are viewed as basic materials to be broken, smashed up and if possible, reused for minor and wasteful applications, such as broken aggregate for roads. Their high functions (as fully formed building components) are ignored. The recycling designation of C & D (Construction and Demolition) debris is adopted.

Anytime that C & D is invoked, you know that you are dealing with a low level of reuse. This is garbage dump diversion notation and has been widely adopted by the garbage industry as well as the recycling industry. What is needed in building is to develop modular assembly of concrete and plaster parts which can be disassembled after the building is no longer useful, taken away and used for a new building. There are many ways in which this can be done and the thinking can be extended to rooves and floors and many other parts.

The federal EPA, never known for its progressive views, has already urged sidewalks to be built out of concrete squares that are joined together by fasteners and can be disassembled and reused. This is a design with obvious applications to monolithic floors, or pads.

At present, LEED emphasizes the use of recycled materials in creating the building. What it needs to do instead is set up cycles of functional reuse which will result in the availability of whole components that can be reused, rather than mere materials. Of course, for as long as the recycling paradigm rules, it is better to use those materials than to make no attempt at all.

There are also built-in features that needs to be reused whole. Kitchen cabinets are typically built in in ways that necessitate their destruction at the end of the building’s life, or even during a remodel. Instead they need to be made as modular components that can easily be removed while preserving their function as cabinets. Distributed utilities (wires, plumbing) are another such feature. Tile work and closets could also use a Zero Waste analysis. Windows and doors need to be designed not to simply go to a reuse yard but to be supremely reusable when they are removed. This may require standard (and reversible) fastening methods for holding them in place and standard sizes and hardware. RFID’s should label each one so that they can be scanned for inventory in their next applications (these would be useful in replacing or remodeling as well since they can be scanned for a model, size, design etc.).

REUSABLE BUILDINGS – There is one important case where the reuse in question is ultimately the entire building. Can you think of a large building that already has the practical ability to be easily dismantled and reassembled? I am referring to steel buildings, such as commercial warehouses. It is entirely possible to assemble these out of standard frames, steel panel skins and bolts or screws. However, most of these are put together with no thought at all as to how they will be reused after a first life. Welding and non-standard parts are the rule. Furthermore, we are mostly burdened by a backward, politically primitive permitting system which dictates the primacy of a demolition industry. This industry, like the garbage industry that underlies it, should one day be but a mere memory, when all construction is done by zero waste standards and is made for reuse. For now, even if a steel building is perfectly dismantlable and reusable, that won’t happen. Political considerations will force a permit to be given to a demolition contractor who is therefore certified to charge a large amount of money for his work. Every contractor will tell you that he cannot afford to dismantle anything but must crush and destroy everything. They will all proudly report though, that they salvage 5% of the value by taking the steel in for recycling and concrete for crushing. The remaining 95% of the value never enters their minds. After they get their permit, and their huge fees, they may graciously allow some more ecologically minded reuse group to dismantle the building. This group will receive no fee, will be notified at the last minute, will be given a punishing schedule that may be impossible to meet, will have to deal with a design that was not made for dismantling and, worst of all in the grand scheme of things, will get no official recognition and will be barred from becoming the preferred contractor for such projects, for a variety of biases having to do with the subsidies given to dumps that destructive demolition can well take advantage of but reusers can’t.

There is a crying need to reform the building permit process so that destructive demolition is barred from touching any building until a Zero Waste group or company has had adequate time and opportunity to design a plan for as close to total reuse of the building as possible or has certified that certain parts cannot presently be reused. Of course this would accompany the need to change the building permit process so that one-way-trip buildings could not be built at all except under the strenuous objections of any concerned party. A non-reusable building could well come under the Environmental Quality Act and require an environmental impact review (EIR).

MORE REUSABLE BUILDINGS – There is another situation where an entire building – or quasi building – can be reused in a startlingly effective manner. I am referring to the recent use of steel shipping containers to create housing. SG Blocks is a company doing this as is Global Portable Buildings. The shipping containers are outfitted in clever ways with utilities, bathrooms, kitchens and more, usually in highly compact forms but sometimes a number of containers are joined together to form multistory or large footprint housing. Sometimes, many more container-houses are arranged in a community to enclose a space or a field that all can share. For Mexican applications, see “Por Fin, Nuestra Casa (website on CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/09/24/container.homes.ap/index.html). All of these outfits are proud, and rightly so, that they are using unwanted, almost discarded products in innovative ways.

So what does Zero Waste theory have to say about these efforts? Leaving aside the wonderful housing opportunities these companies are exposing, could it be done better? Of course it could! ZW theory requires that discard can never be built into any product. The shipping containers are unwanted and were it not for their obvious scrap steel value, would be discarded (melting down formed, high function steel is a form of discard). It is cheaper to build them in China and ship them one way. The Chinese, in that old familiar song, build them to be used once, for shipping, and then abandoned. They take no responsibility for their fate after their first trip. In this garbage oriented world, which takes egregious waste for granted, this kind of irresponsibility is considered normal. But what if the Chinese (or any other manufacturer) were required, by law or by the World Trade Organization, to make full arrangements for the further fate of their shipping containers after their first trip. What difference could that make?

Once again, here are just a few ideas, to show that it can be done. A detailed study would surely refine or replace these ideas with better ones.

Since we can see that the shipping containers serve well as housing units, would it be too much to ask the initial manufacturers to build in the panels that need to be removed later on, the crude way, with a torch? What if each container had a preformed front door, with the kind of reinforcement that has to go around a door frame, but with a panel that was screwed in place from the inside? Then putting in a door would not require a torch and welding but would simply be a matter of removing the door panel and fitting in the prefabbed door. Ditto for windows. And most especially, let us ask how utilities could be wired and plumbed in, in special channels, using special entryways built into the original containers. Do you want to join two containers side by side? Why not have large side panels also premanufactured for quick removal? Are legs needed to raise up these containers? Put in prefabbed supports on the corners to make attaching legs a piece of cake. Every modification that the conversion to housing requires could probably be assisted in some way in the original design, if the world were run efficiently.

As usual, if there is to be a second life, this adds value to the original shipping containers and allows them to be more robustly built, out of stronger materials if needed. The removed panels, being flat and efficiently stackable, could justify the return trip to the manufacturers. And the modifications recommended above can be paid for out of the projected sale for housing.

Also, see the discussion for packaging on this page. Shipping containers are just a heavy steel package, and the same ideas apply to them as to cardboard boxes.

This will give just a hint of how Zero Waste analysis can reduce the wastefulness inherent in even good green building today.
For a look at some great modular designs that won the 2007 Lifecycle Building Challenge, read the first summary description here and then the full description.

Also, for the second winner, a summary description and then see the drawings and read the full description.