How to accelerate green building in Europe

Interview with Steven Borncamp, President of Romania Green Building Council

By Elaine Hsieh

Editor’s note: Steven Borncamp will be speaking June 26-27 at Convergence Paris.

Steven Borncamp is passionate about expanding green building in every corner of Europe. The green building advocate wears many hats: co-director of the Construction21 international network, managing director of the Living Future Europe campaign, chairperson of the Europe Green Building Council Network’s Education Taskforce and founding president of the Romania Green Building Council.

An early proponent of sustainable development, Borncamp in 1993 joined one of the world’s first socially and environmentally responsible investment firms. After founding a consultancy that supported environmentally responsible businesses, he helped to develop seven green building councils throughout Europe. He also created several green building policies and programs to accelerate the green building marketplace in regions where it remained behind.

I recently spoke with Borncamp about his green building efforts.

Elaine Hsieh: In the context of the convergence of technologies such as energy, buildings and transportation, what are you working on that might be of particular interest to businesses and cities trying to enable radical efficiencies across their systems?

Steven Borncamp: One of the things I see that ties everything together in a multi-industry, multi-sector way and really combines technology and sustainability is exemplified in the property tax legislation initiative that we recently got passed in Romania in a fairly influential city. It rewards the greenest buildings and provides a significant property tax benefit for projects that obtain a green building certificate that's recognized by the World Green Building Council. Recognized certifications include LEED, BREEAM and the German DGNB, as well as other standards, including HQE for those in Paris. This has created a lot of interest in the city, in the building community and in investors that are seeking certification for their buildings and resulted in a lot of requests for new services, new technologies and new products that may exist elsewhere but are not present in that market.

In addition, the legislation has created new services and is starting to create pressure for new technologies that don't yet exist because it asks questions that drive energy performance, introduces green energy, etc. Green building certifications typically address very specific areas such as energy performance or how green the materials are for that specific building, but there are also more systemic requirements or criteria, such as trying to reduce the amount of traffic and possible fuel use associated with the building by encouraging public transit use, rewarding buildings that site themselves near other transportation, or providing incentives for alternative or low-emission or zero-emission vehicles.

Hsieh: What are some of the other big challenges that you're seeing for green building in Europe?

Borncamp: Europe, to its credit, passed a number of very ambitious targets. They call it Europe 2020. Even beyond energy, it includes a construction waste development legislation that requires up to 70 percent of construction waste to be diverted from the landfill. There are a number of very ambitious European targets that are just now becoming enforced or will be in the near future. The fear is that they may get watered down, just like a lot of legislation, as deadlines come closer. The industry, or others, may react and look for delays or for lower standards. I think this is one of the challenges that we need to address by showing economic, technical and aesthetic building examples well in advance of this 2020 date. By 2016 or 2017, we need to have these across-the-board successes so that people are encouraged, and we can be in a position to say that a good part of industry is ready and wants these higher standards, and they can do very well with these higher standards. This is, I think, a big challenge but also an opportunity to push ourselves to keep all of this on track.

Another area that our organization [Romania Green Building Council] – and really, many organizations – could do much more is to help address the vocational trades. We hear a lot of interest, for example, in architecture and engineering to do green buildings but also some concerns that, “If I ask for this [green building design], will people know how to implement this and will we really get the performance we need in the final product?” This is really an area that we need to explore and certainly, we need to partner with others who are taking on the challenge to really educate a much wider group in the whole value chain of delivering buildings.

Hsieh: You were recently appointed Managing Director of the Living Future Europe campaign. Tell me about what Living Future Europe is doing. Is the mission the same as the International Living Future Institute based in the U.S.?

Borncamp: The Living Future Europe campaign will highlight the excellent work that's already been started by the International Living Future Institute. In this institute are the authors and administrators of the Living Building Challenge, which is the most ambitious green building standard in the world. Part of the Living Future campaign — a big part of it — will be around how to simply get more “living buildings” across more typologies into more places in Europe.

These very high-performance buildings will encourage industry to accept higher standards. Just to give some perspective, a Living Building Challenge qualified building must have at least one year of demonstrated performance as a positive-energy building, so it's not about just hiring a construction, it's absolutely about performance. It actually has to perform. It also has a list of over 30 chemicals that are common to the construction industry but are not allowed [for Living Building Challenge projects] due to their inherently dangerous levels of toxicity that have been proven over time. Also, the building has to be built on brownfield sites, so it can't take new land away from very scarce land in Europe. In addition, there are other very high-level achievement benchmarks that have to be made.

My role will be to help get people trained and to get businesses, government, and academics aware of what “living buildings” are. And then, as quickly as possible, begin ensuring that we have these not just as a nature center, university or research center as you might expect, but we need living building hospitals, living building shopping malls, and living building offices in all sorts of building typologies. As I see the campaign, we want to put this directly in front of people and let them personally experience these buildings and see that not only is this the right thing to do from a planetary point of view, but that this is an enjoyable, beautiful, economically successful thing to do for anyone. That's my role in the next couple of years, and we don't have any time to waste.

The whole article can be folowed on the link below.

Forrás: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/06/14/steven-borncamp-accelerating-green-building-europe?page=0%2C0

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