Saturday, February 7, 2015

How green is my building

A conference on building sustainability in Bangalore by TERI was organized recently to highlight on the emerging trends and recommendations relevant to the industry. TERI has advised architects, builders, developers, individual home-builders and organisations to evaluate the ‘health of a building’ with nationally acceptable green paradigms. The rating system is based on accepted energy and environmental principles that strike a balance between established practices and emerging concepts. The 6th GRIHA Conference in Bangalore by TERI had engaged with key stakeholders and deliberations to share solutions for accelerating and mainstreaming sustainability in the built environment.

The conference, organised in the wake of the recent government policy on Smart Cities, brought together eminent scientists, research professionals, academicians, practitioners and building industry stakeholders, enabling the sharing of best practices and latest developments on sustainable habitats. It assumes significance as India is expected to become the third largest construction market in the world by 2025. However, the green building footprint is just about three per cent of the current building stock of 25 billion sq. ft, and this is expected to reach 100 billion sq. ft by 2030. 

In an interview with The Hindu-Property Plus, architect Minni Sastry of TERI said,"We recommend location-specific alternative construction methodologies for going green in high-rises where modular and straightforward structural designs can bring down cement, steel and concrete consumption by nearly 25 per cent."

Minni Sastry is Fellow & Area Convenor at Centre for Research on Sustainable Building Science, TERI-South Regional Centre. She is one of the green consultants involved in the GRIHA Building Certification taken up by the institute.

One of the most important GRIHA LD criteria is to find out the carrying capacity of the land, for its ability to absorb population growth without considerable degradation or damage, and this is based upon water availability and available green cover per-capita.

The determining factors include:

1. Water – Quantum of municipal supply and other sustainable sources.

2. Green cover – Total per capita available/made available on site.




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