As environmental issues have reached a fever pitch recently with the debate over global warming—including an Oscar win for former vice president Al Gore—it’s becoming clear that what might have been dismissed as a fad and its attendant buzz words has now become a movement. And chances are, if you don’t already have clients asking for some type of green solution, you will some day soon.
If you do it right, green construction doesn’t have to come at a premium, and any premiums you do encounter can be accounted for in plenty of time to be covered by the client and not by you.
“Does green building cost more or does ignorance cost more?” asks Charlie Popeck, president of Green Ideas, a green building consulting firm based in Phoenix, Arizona,. “People don’t understand what they need to do differently than what they normally do. How do they cover it? They cover it by throwing money at it.”
Popeck remembers a meeting he had about three years ago. He got a call from a mechanical engineering firm who wanted to know more about the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system.
When Popeck met with the company, they had about 30 people in the meeting anxious to learn more and he asked them what their interest in LEED was. They told him they had just been awarded a LEED project and they needed to figure out how to do it. “How did you get a LEED project if you didn’t know anything about it?” he asked, somewhat startled. “We just added $100,000 to the bid,” they said.
There’s a better way, in Popeck’s view—become educated. “You are probably already doing 70-80 percent of the things required by LEED, you just don’t know you’re doing it yet because you don’t know about the program. Once you know, it takes the mystery out of it. If it does cost more, you can at least put some sensible, logical cost to it instead of just saying, ‘Let’s add $100,000 to cover it,’” he says. “We’ve done several projects where it doesn’t cost any more to get LEED certified. And actually some of it costs less.”
But you won’t know until you know. The LEED program is just one option for understanding and incorporating green building standards. There are many aspects of green building you can learn and incorporate based on your specific role in the project.
Ben Ludlow, a project manager for Fenton Construction in Colorado, has been involved in green building for about seven years. He has attended seminars and conferences, researched information on the Internet, read books, met with people involved in green building and visited job sites to learn all he can about the most current green building techniques and materials. He recommends the same for anyone thinking about going green.
“The biggest thing about becoming green is becoming knowledgeable,” Ludlow says. The more you know about techniques and materials, the more you’ll understand where the true costs lie and how to best manage them, he says. Take your Time One of the biggest costs is backtracking, says Popeck. He has had several clients come to him with construction documents and a request that the building be LEED certified. “Well guess what, you’ve got to go back and redesign and change this and change that,” he says, pointing out that green building begins with design, not with construction. “Then they say LEED costs more. But it’s not because LEED costs more, it’s because you didn’t know what you wanted when you started.”
“Our big push is to get the whole design team working together to see what sort of synergies and trade-offs there are,” says Jason Buch, a project manager with Green Building Services, a green building consulting company in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in helping projects become LEED certified. By getting the design team around the same table, the team can consider the project as a whole and decide what up-front costs are worth the long-term benefits they provide in the overall life of the building. Then they can design the building and the process in order to qualify for LEED credit.
It’s also important to take the time up front to bid the job right. “One of the biggest frustrations I have about green building is that people bid it in the same cycle and the same manner as they do ordinary projects,” says Richard Szecsy, vice president, Lattimore Materials, a concrete and aggregate supplier based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He recommends taking the time up front to understand the requirements of the job, particularly if the job requires green materials that may not be as familiar to the workers on the job.
“When contractors invest more time up front to understanding the requirements and how it will impact their costs and crews, they will have great success,” says Szecsy. “When they’ve rushed through the bidding process and gone for the lowest bid without accounting for green requirements, they ultimately eat the costs.”
If you are not the owner or developer of the building, you many not have control over when you get involved in a project, whether it is designed green from the start, whether you have to make adjustments after the construction documents are complete, and how much time you’ve have to provide a bid. But you can help educate your clients, both about the need to do up-front planning and about the benefits of going green even if up-front planning didn’t take place.
“The earlier you start, the less it’s going to cost you up front,” Popeck says. “But even if you have to go back and redesign, a green building will still be a lot less expensive to own and operate and maintain, which is the real cost of owning a building.”
There is an easy way to control costs and earn green points (and LEED points, too), say these green builders: Shop close to home. Shipping takes an environmental toll, and the green approach is to minimize the environmental impact of transportation by working with materials found nearby rather than shipped across the country or across borders.
For LEED credit, that means sourcing materials within a 500 mile radius of your job. If you are the concrete piece of the puzzle, this is a no-brainer for you. “I can’t imagine many projects getting their concrete from further than 500 miles away,” Buch says.
Even if you are responsible for more materials than just the concrete, using locally or regionally sourced materials can be one way to help the bottom line. Popeck has found that it often costs less to buy materials sourced close to home rather than materials imported from elsewhere. So shopping for local materials may help tip the scale back in your direction. Choose the Right Materials—And Know How to Use Them In terms of product and material choices, your options are vast. A green project can use anything from low VOC (volatile organic compounds) carpets and paints that may not cost any more than traditional materials to photovoltaic solar panels or ground source heating and cooling systems that will be tens of thousands of dollars more than traditional alternatives. And the materials you choose may significantly impact your schedule because of availability or different installation requirements.
“The biggest cost for the contractors is in planning and purchasing,” explains Jodi Soboll, LEED program coordinator for Hathaway Dinwiddie, a large commercial construction company in Northern California. “You have to look around, you have to find the right product and you have to look for cost competitiveness. You have to plan your schedule a little differently because of whatever materials you’re using or whatever method you’re using that may be a little different,”
Szecsy points out concrete options as examples. More environmentally friendly concrete includes high volume fly ash concrete, pervious concrete, reflective concrete and self-compacting concrete. Each offers different environmental benefits, and each requires contractors and workers to alter their thought process and methods.
“Any time you talk about altering methods, there is only one thing the numbers do: go up,” he says. Szecsy estimates that the costs of these environmentally friendly concrete options will run 8-12 percent more than traditional concrete. And those numbers can be higher if you don’t know how to work with the concrete you will be laying.
He points to high volume fly ash concrete as an example. Fly ash is a recycled post-industrial waste product that can replace a percentage of cement in the production of concrete. However, the resulting concrete tends to set up differently than traditional concrete—almost more like pudding. Therefore the contractor and the crews need to understand what they are working with or they will run into trouble.
“The whole process still takes the same four hours as regular concrete. But it’s what happens during those four hours that makes the difference,” Szecsy says. “That’s where those hidden costs can be associated, whether it’s with the evaporation retarder or the different troweling techniques.”
Whether it’s concrete or any other material that may alter your construction methods and schedule, Szecsy recommends being smart enough to know what you don’t know and ask for help. “The most successful projects we’ve done is when the general contractor sat down a couple months ahead of time and said, ‘We know this is coming up, we know we’re going to struggle with this, help us together to figure this out.’ And those projects were awesome,” Szecsy says. Get Experience—Then Sell It Once you’re got things figured out, capitalize on them, say these contractors. Your first green building, your first LEED certification, your first pour with high volume fly ash concrete can all be daunting and ultimately expensive. “And they’ll stay that way if you never do a second building or certification or pour,” says Szecsy.
Buch points out that there are efficiencies of scale you can seize as you do more and more green projects. “We always say after you’ve done one LEED project, it’s a lot easier to do the second one,” he says.
Take LEED documentation, for example. If you are seeking LEED credit for sourcing your concrete within a 500 mile radius, you have to have documentation from your suppliers indicating you meet this requirement. “Concrete contractors tend to use the same suppliers, so if you have suppliers who have supplied other LEED jobs, they know where their stuff comes from and they’ve already got a letter they can fax to you,” Buch says. And that makes the process easier, faster and cheaper the next time around. That experience is one of the best ways to both keep your costs under control and to turn in the appropriate bids for the specialized work to be done.
“The most obvious way to manage costs is experience,” says Szecsy. “It’s a chicken and egg argument: How do you get experience knowing what the higher costs are until you actually do a job that has higher costs?”
You’ll never really know until you’ve tried, but it starts with educating yourself as much as possible. “How can you do anything effectively if you aren’t educated?” asks Popeck. And that education and experience can be the ticket to long-term success with green building projects.
“The hidden gem in this for contractors is experience,” says Szecsy. “You can actually sell and market your green building experience. The next project you bid, you can not only walk in there with your bid, but you can qualify your bid and say, ‘We’ve done green building projects already. We’re not scared.’”