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EPA Honors Green Building Challenge Winners

Release Date: 10/08/2009
Contact Information: Dave Ryan Ryan.dave@epa.gov 202-564-7827 202-564-5355

WASHINGTON -- EPA recently honored six innovative green concepts designed to reduce the environmental and energy impacts of buildings. These concepts may assist the building industry in reducing more than 88 million tons of building-related construction and demolition debris sent to U.S. landfills each year.

The EPA awards recognized student and professional designs for buildings and building projects, as well as special categories, including the creation of green jobs.

“Designing buildings and building products with front-end lifecycle thinking is the key to real green building,” said Lisa Heinzerling, associate administrator for EPA’s Office of Policy, Economics, and Innovation. “These innovators are great examples of how we can build sustainable structures that help meet the needs of this and future generations.”

Lifecycle building is designing structures to facilitate disassembly and material reuse to minimize waste, energy consumption, and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Also known as design for disassembly and design for deconstruction, lifecycle building describes the idea of creating high-performance buildings today that are stocks of resources for the future. EPA recently reported that doubling the reuse and recycling of construction and demolition debris would result in an emissions savings of 150 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, equal to the entire annual carbon emissions from the state of North Carolina.

EPA, along with its partners, the American Institute of Architects, West Coast Green, the Collaborative for High Performance Schools, and StopWaste.Org, invited professionals and students nationwide to submit designs and ideas that support cost-effective disassembly and anticipate future use of building materials. The competition was open to architects, reuse experts, engineers, designers, planners, contractors, builders, educators, environmental advocates and students. This year, the competition was extended to include international participants who hailed from Singapore, Taiwan, Argentina, Colombia, France, Egypt, and the United Kingdom.

More information on the winners: https://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/pubs/lbc3.html

More information on Green Building: https://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding