Do you know what it takes to build and manage high-performance green buildings?

Choose technologies, implement best-practices, support behavior changes and plan carefully to create buildings that conserve resources, reduce waste, save money, and keep occupants happy and healthy.

Managing buildings and their complex and interconnected systems requires an understanding of technology, financial planning, and even human behavior to create solutions that conserve resources, reduce waste, save money, and satisfy occupants.

Green the Building exposes the complex world of sustainable design, construction, and operations in a succinct and simplified context that allows you to grasp the whole system, learn technical concepts, and try out building strategies in a risk-free environment.

Who is it for? For those curious about sustainable building, Green the Building highlights what questions to ask. For those responsible for greening buildings, Green the Building encourages moving beyond professional silos, jargon, and minimum compliance standards towards discovery of actions you can take to improve performance and address challenges ahead.

Why we Built It: The U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Office for Federal Building Health and Performance (OFBHP) created Green the Building as an extension of the agency’s Sustainable Facilities Tool (SFTool) to pose these practical questions and broaden the circle of those engaged in the process of trying out solutions. We designed Green the Building to appeal to building professionals as well as the general public since most of us spend 90% of our time in buildings and can all contribute to creating more healthy, comfortable, and affordable buildings. Green the Building aims to put ideas into practice by increasing the use of sustainable practices and technologies in federal buildings and beyond, which directly supports GSA’s mission.

How it Works:

• Green the Building places you in the role of Team Lead, charged with greening buildings through strategic Energy, Waste, Water, and Occupant Satisfaction improvements given a limited budget.
• • Make tough choices from among action cards that include: Lighting, HVAC, Water, Workplace, Practices, and Bundles.
  • Face random events, including extreme temperature change and employee turnover, that challenge your ability to plan ahead.
• Green the Building is browser-based, device-agnostic (works great on tablets and mobile!), and free.

Here to Help: Embedded links open a new browser window that connects you directly to SFTool explanations of the practices, technologies, and concepts you encounter in non-technical language.

What it doesn’t do...yet: Great sustainable design considers context, such as regional and climate variations or building and mechanical system age. We do not yet reflect this level of complexity in actions or scoring but plan to add these details to future versions.

Feedback: See something we missed? Have ideas not yet included as cards or building types? Be part of the conversation and tell us here. Has Green the Building inspired you to put ideas into practice? Share your project case studies here.