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International Green Building Challenge 2000

Green Building Challenge 2000

Along with 16 other countries, the United States accepted the Green Building Challenge, an international effort to evaluate and improve the performance of green buildings. GBC started out as a competition to see which country had the greenest buildings and evolved into a cooperative process among countries to measure the performance of green buildings. Although the auto industry can measure efficiency by miles per gallon, the buildings industry has no standard way to measure a building's energy and environmental performance. The founders of the Green Building Challenge hope that better tools for measuring green buildings will lead to a higher level of performance for green buildings. The ultimate goal is to develop buildings that contribute to global sustainability by conserving natural resources and minimizing energy use.

U.S. Team Evaluates Green Buildings

The U.S. Green Building Challenge team presented case studies of five buildings at an international meeting in The Netherlands in October 2000. The United States and teams from other countries selected green buildings for the case studies and then used an evaluation tool developed for the GBC. The goal is to improve the evaluation software tool, called the Green Building Assessment Tool (GBTool), so that it can be used internationally, while taking into account regional or national conditions. GBTool helps to assess and evaluate the energy and environmental performance of three building types: schools, multifamily residences, and small-scale office buildings.

Five Innovative Buildings Selected for GBC 2000

Search our buildings database for more information.

The five projects above were selected not only because they are green, but also because building data is available as inputs to the software tool. The tool has been refined since the first Green Building Challenge in 1998, and participating countries will provide feedback to further improve the tool at the Green Building Challenge 2000 meeting in The Netherlands, part of the Sustainable Building 2000 International Conference. The conference will bring together green building professionals from around the globe.

Green Building Challenge '98

The U.S. team participated in GBC '98, selecting five U.S. buildings for detailed evaluation of energy and environmental performance. The five buildings comprise one multifamily housing project, one school, and three office projects. The three offices included one new facility and three existing buildings that were renovated. More information on these projects is available on our buildings database.

U.S. participation in the Green Building Challenge is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Building Technology, State and Community Programs.

 Related Topics

U.S. Green Building Council LEED Green Building Rating System
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Last updated: 10 December 2007