Green home building is poised to be the next great sales pitch in America's environmental renaissance. By 2010, half of new homes built are expected to be classified as "green" as more builders try to appeal to consumers worried about global warming, the environment and rising energy costs. Builders say green homes are more durable and tend to sell much faster than traditionally built houses.
But how do you tell if a "green" home is truly green? There are some 80 different local and state green building organizations and at least two different national groups promoting their own rules on what constitutes a green home. The result: a contentious war over whose rules become the national standard for making a house sustainable.
Perhaps the best known group in green building is the U.S. Green Building Council, or USGBC, a non-profit group that developed its own point rating system for green commercial projects and has certified 800 projects as green since 2000 through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, or LEED. The organization uses consultants under contract to certify projects according to USGBC rules.
In 2004, the Green Building Council rolled out a pilot program for similar grading of residential projects, and today 350 builders are enrolled for 6,000 green homes to go through LEED certification. To get a home certified as green, builders would have to pay about $2,000 for the required inspection. An official program for green homes should be rolled out this fall.
Meanwhile, the National Association of Home Builders, a trade group with 235,000 corporate members, is at work on its own green building standards. The process has been a long and arduous one, incorporating input from not only builders, but architects, interior designers and construction product manufacturers. The rules, being developed in collaboration with the International Code Council, will be written for accreditation from the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI.
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