Sustainable Building Technical Manual - Etn-presco.net

BERKELEY UNIFIEDSCHOOL DISTRICTBerkeley, CaliforniaIn 1994, the Berkeley Unified School District in Berkeley, California, enactedenvironmental policies that established green building goals. The schooldistrict’s Materials/Indoor Air Quality Policy states:It is the intent of the Berkeley Unified School District Facilities Program tominimize building occupants’ exposure to uncomfortable and potentiallyharmful interior environments. This effort starts with design and constructionof new and renovated facilities, and continues through the life of thefacility with maintenance practices. 1The Energy Design Standard Policy states:The building energy design standards policy of the Berkeley Unified SchoolDistrict seeks to achieve three broad goals. These are:1) To provide a high quality indoor environment with respect to thermalcomfort, lighting, and ventilation, for student, faculty, and staff.2) To reduce energy consumption and maintenance costs of the District onan ongoing basis.3) To improve energy conservation awareness and education of students,faculty, and staff. 2Both policies provide additional specific green design criteria. TheMaterials/Indoor Air Quality Policy deals with site layout and landscape,building materials, finishes and furnishings, building systems, and constructionpractices. The Energy Design Standard Policy establishes specific energyperformance criteria and objectives as follows:1) Improve district-wide energy use/square foot by 40 percent before theyear 2000.2) New and substantially renovated buildings shall exceed State EnergyCode (Title 24) standards by a minimum of 35 percent.3) Buildings which are retrofitted for energy conservation shall, as a minimum,meet the applicable provisions of the State Energy Code evenwhere not required by law. 3ples of sustainability. In some instances, clients,such as governmental agencies and private organizations,may already have an environmental policythat informs and supports the project goals.❑ Establish green design criteria.The design criteria, which are more specific than thegoals, should begin to clarify the most importantand relevant aspects of the project. For example,they may include a certain level of improvement inenergy efficiency over conventional usage, indicatea percentage of renewable energy strategies andequipment to be used in the project, stipulaterequirements for sensitive site design, provideguidelines for indoor environmental quality, andindicate levels of resource conservation and recycling.In addition, they may indicate that life-cycleassessment be used to analyze the direct and indirectenvironmental impacts of building-materialselection, and that broad community-related environmentalissues, such as preservation of existinggreen spaces or reuse of historic structures, beaddressed.❑ Set priorities for the project design criteria.– Prioritize design options based on environmentalguidelines and project constraints. Prioritiesshould flow from the vision statement, the goals,and the design criteria, and should support of theproject’s environmental policy. The design team,may, for example, decide that energy efficiency,indoor air quality, or several combined criteria arethe main priorities for a project. Design criterianeed to be prioritized in the context of the project’sbudget and scheduling constraints. Therealities of these constraints may allow somedesign criteria to be included, but exclude othersdeemed less important by the team, or lessachievable with current technology. It is also possible that the project design couldbe flexible enough to allow incorporation of additional criteria at a later, more practicaldate. Setting priorities will provide the critical direction needed by the designteam in making project decisions related to design, products, and systems.– Seek to incorporate additional green measures through this process. Prioritizing criteriaalso may allow the design team to justify additional green measures for theproject, by using the projected financial savings of one priority, such as energy conservation,to balance the costs of other green measures. Green building materials,for example, though environmentally significant, may not have the same directfinancial payback as energy savings and may have higher up front costs than conventionalproducts. Total project costs can remain reasonable, however, if savingsfrom the energy-efficiency measures can offset the costs of other features.Building Program❑ Develop a building program detailing the project’s green building requirements.A building program develops a clear statement of the building owner’s or client’sexpectations for the building—and the function of the entire building and its variousrooms and related structures—within the budget, schedule, and physical constraints of