Green buildings rapidly evolving as best design standard

PANELLING MADE from plastic waste, wood recycled from old ships, carpets of recycled plastic and CO2 monitors that regulate the proportion of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the room. These are just a handful of things you are likely to encounter if you walk into the ITC Green Centre in Gurgaon or the Patni Knowledge Centre in Noida, alongside more ‘conventional’ green measures like solar panels and fully day-lit office spaces. These two buildings , along with a few others across the country, have been among the early adopters of the green building movement in the country; a direct result of the increasing awareness on sustainability.

Quiz most people on why they are greening their buildings, and you can be guaranteed that the answer will touch upon them wanting to do their bit to save the earth and trying to cut down on emissions. So one tends to sit up and take notice when Anirudh Patni says, “We started going green because it makes imminent business sense. Using green intelligently can be beneficial to the bottomline.” The senior vice-president for strategy and corporate development at Patni Computer Systems says the company’s green spaces also make for healthier employees, directing impacting productivity.

A green building, by definition, is one which conserves natural resources, is energy efficient, and a healthier space for its occupants as compared to a conventional building. In India, the green building movement has been pioneered by CII which set up the Indian Green Building Council in 2001 at the behest of then US President Bill Clinton. “We decided that the headquarters of the CII-Green Building Centre in Hyderabad would be housed in a green building that would showcase all the different technologies which could be used in such a building,” says Jamshyd Godrej, chairman, CIISohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre.

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Source: Economic Times, 2009-11-27, Link