New Thinking for a Sustainable Building Industry

Our current way of life is destroying the natural environment that we dependupon and our generation is placing a huge environmental liability on the shoulders of our children.

Leo Murray has produced an excellent video “Wake Up, Freak Out and Then Get a Grip” that summarizes what we can expect if we decide to continue with the current business as usual attitude. If we do not help prevent global warming from reaching the critical tipping point, life on this planet will be very different in a bad way.  We still have a wee bit of time but need to make paradigm shift types of change if we are going to avoid disaster.http://wakeupfreakout.org/film/tipping.html

It doesn’t need to turn out this way as the business plan for a sustainable economy has already been written. “Natural Capitalism” written by Paul Hawkins, Amory and Hunter Lovins outlines a business plan based upon current knowledge and technology that can help us achieve sustainability.   All we need to do, as a society is to recognize the urgency of our problem and implement an action plan to change our ways.  The rate of implementation needs to accelerate significantly if we are going to reach the tipping point of creating a sustainable economy before it is too late. 

There is no reason not to change as pioneers of sustainable business practice are enjoying high margin business success. So there really is no excuse for not reinventing commerce to achieve balance with nature!

The evidence shows that sustainable companies are hugely more successful and in case studies of seven sustainable companies that are summarized in the “Sustainability Advantage” by Bob Willard he determined that sustainable companies are 38% more profitable.

Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets became motivated to make a difference in the way he ran his company when he read the book the Ecology of Commerce written by Paul Hawkins.  This book completely changed the his way of thinking and contributed to the creation of a very successful role model company that is committed to achieving “Mission 0” or zero net negative impact on the planet by the year 2020. 

Integrated Design joined the sustainability revolution when they decided to turn the barriers identified in a strategic issues paper “Institutional Barriers to Energy Efficient Building Design” by Amory Lovin’s into opportunities for a successful sustainable project management and commissioning company. Integrated Designs are helping to transform the building industry and have been able to achieve LEED Gold levels of performance at “No Additional Capital Cost”. This is not nearly good enough if we are going to eliminate the 35% of GHG emissions from the building industry.

For the next generation of buildings, our industry needs to work towards achieving Net 0 Impact Performance for Net 0 Additional Cost by eliminating waste in the overall project delivery process. To achieve much higher levels of performance will require “New Thinking” about the project delivery process. 

In his book “Broken Buildings Busted Budgets” Lepatner provides incite into why the traditional building process is severely flawed and why there are opportunities to reduce project delivery costs by a minimum of 10%.  If we do the cowboy math this 10% savings could be used to fund the 6% premium it takes to hit LEED Platinum and the remaining 4% could be used to purchase the renewable energy resources required to get us to Net 0 energy.

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

The transformation to a sustainable building industry is going to take a “New Way of Thinking” to achieve the paradigm shift  that will be required if we are going to sustain life on this planet.  Recently there has been lots of good new books out “Mind Matters”, “Opposable Minds” about why Right Brain People will rule the world and Integrative Thinkers will take the barriers to sustainability and turn them incredible sustainable business opportunities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObMGHsGMkK0

Fortunately the building industry has come up with a new approach Integrated Project Delivery that the has the potential to
transform the building industry by eliminating enough waste in the process to enable high performance Net 0 buildings at very little if any additional cost.

All we need is leaders like you to implement this new approach that has the potential to revolutionize the way we do business in the building industry. Just think Net 0 building at Net 0 additional cost. Anything is possible!