Comprehensive evaluation on environmental impact of green buildings considering sustainable development

Abstract

Featuring energy efficiency, comfort, and economical efficiency, green buildings facilitate resource conservation, environment protection, and sustainable development in China, a country that is rapidly urbanized. However, there is not yet an effective means to quantify the environmental impact of green buildings. Based on environmental sustainability, this paper puts forward a novel method that comprehensively evaluates the environmental impact of green buildings, which includes environmental benefits into post-evaluation. Taking seven green buildings as examples, the indoor environment improvement was measured by temperature, humidity, CO2 content, and illuminance. Besides, the energy consumptions and carbon emissions of green buildings were quantified. The results show that the environmental benefits of green buildings are implicit, including energy-saving benefit, land-saving benefit, water-saving benefit, material-saving benefit, and indoor environment improvement. The seven green buildings were found to meet relevant standards on heating energy consumptions, and have a clear edge in renewable energy consumption. the energy consumptions and indoor environment scores of green buildings are positively correlated. In other words, for a green building, the higher the environmental benefits, the better the comprehensive evaluation result. The research results lay a theoretical basis for quantifying the environmental impact of green buildings.