Environmental Assessment Of Office Buildings

BREEAM was launched in 1990 to provide an environmental assessment and labelling scheme for buildings. The scheme is updated periodically to ensure that it continues to represent best practice. This publication describes the version for offices and provides a background to the scheme and the benefits that it can present as well as describing the structure and content of the assessment process.

This Special Issue covers a wide range of areas—including building orientation, service life, use of photocatalytically active structures and PV facades, implications of transportation system, building types (i.e., high rise, multilevel, commercial, residential), life cycle assessment, and structural engineering—that need to be considered in the environmental impact assessment of buildings, and the chapters include case studies across the globe. Consideration of these strategies would help reduce energy and material consumption, environmental emissions, and waste generation associated with all phases of a building’s life cycle. Chapter 1 demonstrates that green star concrete exhibits the same structural properties as conventional concrete in Australia. Chapter 2 showed that the use of TiO2 as a photocatalyst on the surface of construction materials with a suitable stable binding agent, such as aggregates, would enable building walls to absorb NOx from air. This study found that TiO2 has the potential to reduce ambient concentrations of NOx from areas where this pollutant becomes concentrated under solar irradiation. Chapter 3 presents the life cycle assessment of architecturally integrated glass–glass photovoltaics in building facades to find the appropriate material composition for a multicolored PV façade offering improved environmental performance. Chapter 4 shows that urban office buildings lacking appropriate orientation experienced indoor overheating. Chapter 5 details four modeling approaches that were implemented to estimate buildings’ response towards load shedding. Chapter 6 covers the life cycle GHG emissions of high-rise residential housing block to discover opportunities for environmental improvement. Chapter 7 discusses an LCA framework that took into account variation in the service life of buildings associated with the use of different types of materials. Chapter 8 presents a useful data mining algorithm to conduct life cycle asset management in residential developments built on transport systems.

"Buildings labelled as 'green' bring with them high expectations, particularly in the commercial office sector. It is commonly accepted that 'green' buildings are designed, constructed and operated with the specific objectives of efficient use of resources: energy, water and materials, reducing negative impact on the environment, and also provide comfortable and healthy internal environments which result in high levels of occupant satisfaction and related productivity. In theory these 'green' intentions are predicted to bring positive results; however, whether in reality this is always the case is open to question. Unfortunately research into how 'green' commercial office buildings are actually performing is limited due to the relatively recent nature of this building type and the private and restrictive culture of commercial building management. This research aims to determine whether commercial office buildings whose designs follow 'green' principles or have been assessed by a widely accepted environmental assessment tool are outperforming non green (or conventional) buildings in terms of their environmental performance, specifically in energy and water use and in their ability to provide occupant satisfaction. The research focuses on nine commercial office buildings located in the City of Adelaide, South Australia with approximately 135,000 m2 of net lettable floor area. The research was based on post occupancy evaluation involving evaluation of building design, energy (base building and tenancies) and water consumption, monitoring of the internal building environment including temperature, relative humidity and lighting levels, as well as surveying the building occupants to assess perceived thermal, visual and aural comforts, and also perceived health and productivity. Analyses took place in two stages with the first stage involving the analyses of the individual aspects and the second stage correlating these aspects to develop a model of user satisfaction for the assessment of green building performance."--Abstract.

This publication describes the BRE Environmental Assessment (BREEAM) scheme for offices.

Life cycle assessment enables the identification of a broad range of potential environmental impacts occurring across the entire life of a product, from its design through to its eventual disposal or reuse. The need for life cycle assessment to inform environmental design within the built environment is critical, due to the complex range of materials and processes required to construct and manage our buildings and infrastructure systems. After outlining the framework for life cycle assessment, this book uses a range of case studies to demonstrate the innovative input-output-based hybrid approach for compiling a life cycle inventory. This approach enables a comprehensive analysis of a broad range of resource requirements and environmental outputs so that the potential environmental impacts of a building or infrastructure system can be ascertained. These case studies cover a range of elements that are part of the built environment, including a residential building, a commercial office building and a wind turbine, as well as individual building components such as a residential-scale photovoltaic system. Comprehensively introducing and demonstrating the uses and benefits of life cycle assessment for built environment projects, this book will show you how to assess the environmental performance of your clients’ projects, to compare design options across their entire life and to identify opportunities for improving environmental performance.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has prepared an Environmental Assessment (EA), DOE/EA-1107, analyzing the environmental effects relating to the construction and operation of an office building at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). SLAC is a national facility operated by Stanford University, California, under contract with DOE. The center is dedicated to research in elementary particle physics and in those fields that make use of its synchrotron facilities. The objective for the construction and operation of an office building is to provide adequate office space for existing SLAC Waste Management (WM) personnel, so as to centralize WM personnel and to make WM operations more efficient and effective. Based on the analyses in the EA, the DOE has determined that the proposed action does not constitute a major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment within the meaning of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). Therefore, the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement is not required. This report contains the Environmental Assessment, as well as the Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI).