A Reflection on Green-washing in the Built Environment

In a day and age where being environmentally conscious in design is expected, enforced by social pressure and government mandate, sustainable design is a recurring notion. Key phrases like "green design", "carbon neutral", "ESD", and others are thrown around, often forming a stronger part of the marketing strategy than the actual design. 

Unfortunately, it is common for sustainable design strategies to be considered as after-thoughts, being placed last in the order of design priorities resulting in poorly integrated or ineffective solutions. Even when the solution is functional, this can often mean a result which only achieves a fraction of the potential energy savings or sustainability goals. For example, the green-washing of buildings through the late-stage addition of solar panels, green-facades, or rainwater tanks. While these strategies do make a difference, and are certainly an improvement on no strategies at all, they often have limited effectiveness, with relatively little impact on the overall project's sustainability. 

Sustainability must be more than just a secondary addition, added in the latter stages of the design process. This green-washing misrepresents the true characteristics of sustainable design, and dilutes the public perception of sustainable buildings. 

One contributing factor to this is the difficulty in quantifying and assessing sustainable design. Measuring the damage done to the environment by a building by the number of trees chopped down, or the amount of CO2 produced is relatively easy. However, measuring the inverse - how much damage was not done, is challenging and often highly subjective. When assessing a building, we often consider the materials, and the energy used to produce them. But what about the energy used to produce the factories, or the trucks which transported them, or the impacts the building may continue to have 50 years into the future? A building does not exist in isolation, and this infinite web of connections and interdependancies makes it impossible to objectively measure the impact of a single building. 

There are a number of official rating systems around the world, designed to create a yardstick by which to measure sustainability, such as LEEDS, NABERS, or the Green Star rating. However, all these yardsticks have their own flaws, and are open to exploitation or manipulation. Perhaps most significantly, all these systems require developer to pay substantial fees to receive a rating, adding another barrier for users. 

In conclusion, green-washing represents a challenge to sustainable design, partially caused by the lack of a standardised system for quantifying and evaluating sustainability in the built environment. While it may be impossible to develop a universal yardstick, this does raise questions about how we can better define and understand sustainability in design.