A term used to describe furniture, consumer products, landscaping, or new or renovated buildings that use recycled or natural materials, minimize waste, or reduce energy consumption.

The concept of green, or sustainable, design has particularly captured the imagination of architects. Indeed, in the United States buildings are responsible for at least 40 percent of energy usage. Responding to that stunning figure, the construction community is adopting more environmentally sound building techniques. According to a recent figure, as much as 6 percent of non-residential construction in the U.S. is now green. Moreover, architects are systematizing this commitment by submitting their buildings for LEED certification, and many cities and states are even requiring that buildings have it.

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. This rating system, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, ranks buildings in a range—Certified, Silver, Gold, and Platinum-according to 69-point scorecard of ecologically friendly characteristics. Today, more than 650 buildings have some kind of LEED status.

While each LEED point demonstrates different elements of green building, sustainability ostensibly involves passive as well as active methods. Passive techniques allow a building to respond to its climate. An office that catches predominant winds and has operable windows, for example, requires far less air-conditioning than, say, a sealed-shut glass tower that faces the afternoon sun.

Solar orientation is equally important. The best passive buildings are sited along an east-west axis, which reduces exposure to hot, direct sunlight in the morning and afternoon; in the Northern Hemisphere south-facing sunshades protect a building from mid-afternoon rays. Moreover, architects reduce buildings' dependence on energy-hogging light bulbs by allowing that daylight to flow far into the interior. For nighttime lighting, they will opt for fluorescent or LED fixtures over incandescent bulbs.

As the use of LEDs suggests, active systems are ingeniously high-tech. The sun's power can be harnessed to heat water via solar panels, generate electricity with photovoltaic arrays, or even create hydrogen power, for example. Integrated graywater recycling systems can filter bath, laundry, and dishwasher water and reuse it to fill toilets or water gardens.

In many cases, green design is as good for the health of the consumer as it is for the planet. Many green buildings and products, from sisal rugs to low-VOC paints, do not use or emit allergy-provoking chemicals.

Context

Green design is as old as humankind. Ancient adobe homes in the Southwest, for example, exemplify a passive building technique known as thermal mass. The thick clay walls capture heat during the day, slowly releasing it to the house occupants during the chilly desert nights. The veranda of the Old South, meanwhile, is actually a kind of sunscreen that shelters the main building. But in the 20th century, an abundance of cheap energy and the popularity of the International Style of architecture fostered a huge boom of boxy buildings that paid little attention to their surroundings or climate.

Green building first tried countering the phenomenon in the 1960s and '70s, especially as the energy climate reached its apex. But proponents made few inroads into the mainstream. Even today people will recoil at green design, because they conflate the concept with geodesic homes and mud huts. In recent years, designers of buildings and products have made a point of combining sustainability with ease of use and good looks, assuaging vestigial fears of the green handle.

Other fields of design have been slower to go green. Most product packaging is still excessive in quantity, and do not use biodegradable, cellulose-based plastics. Just as furniture has slowly caught onto the green movement, so interior designers have been correspondingly tardy. And there are only a handful of landscape architects who specify plants that have bioremediation capabilities-although many more at least use plants native to the site, following on the heels of influential practitioners like Steve Martino.

Despite the various techniques available to measure the sustainable qualities of a design, including LEED for buildings and the U.S. EPA's Energy Star program for appliances, the sudden interest in green design has spawned accusations of "greenwashing." In architecture, even rigorous, tried-and-true formulas like LEED are subject to criticism. For one, many building owners call the LEED certification process a time-consuming exercise in paperwork. Recently, when Boston implemented a new zoning code that requires private developers to build green, it did so using a LEED-inspired system that could be more quickly verified by city officials.

One controversial aspect of green design that seems to have been resolved is expense. While green design still means paying a premium, new innovations and greater demand have driven down costs. In addition, many proponents of green design have recognized that traditional sources of energy are more likely to climb upward, which means more quickly amortizing that premium.

Additional Resources
Green and Sustainable Building Guidebook (Online)
Overview of Sustainability and Design
US Green Building Resource Council

Green Living Appliances

Books
The Lazy Environmentalist by Josh Dorfman
The Eco Design Sourcebook by Alastair Fuad-Luke
Design for Sustainability by Janis Birkeland