{"id":390,"date":"2013-11-03T20:54:56","date_gmt":"2013-11-04T01:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/roofingmagazine.com\/?p=390"},"modified":"2013-11-03T20:54:56","modified_gmt":"2013-11-04T01:54:56","slug":"green-building-innovation-important-refinement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roofingmagazine.com\/green-building-innovation-important-refinement\/","title":{"rendered":"Green-building Innovation Is Important, But So Is Refinement"},"content":{"rendered":"
In March 2006, I swore allegiance to the wildly popular green-building movement. I even put the kibosh on my favorite joke about recycling in the landfill\u2014you know, so not to deprive future generations of fossil fuels and diamonds. Nice.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve worked in facility management at Duke University<\/a> Health System for 26 years. In this profession, being overly pragmatic is an occupational hazard. So, why did an \u201cold-school\u201d guy (no pun intended) show up at a green love fest alongside folk with funny-colored hair and way too many bumper stickers? Quite simply, I came to the party to plea for intellectual honesty.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, early on, the sustainability movement offered myriad earth-friendly materials often with little thought to their durability or life cycle. Similarly, early building rating programs focused largely on the merits of individual products without factoring their proper integration into functional systems or assemblies. Consider, for example, the many thousands of squares of reflective \u201ccool roofing\u201d membranes applied over non-durable assemblies. A LEED-applicable roofing membrane that fails prematurely because of inferior quality or misapplication does not look very sustainable buried in a landfill.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no longer 2006, and the greenie you\u2019re partying with may be a blue-haired, retired architect. It\u2019s encouraging so many in the building industry, and particularly the roofing industry, have embraced the concept of durability as the essence of green and sustainable building design. Moving beyond mere branding \u201cstrategery,\u201d sustainability can be good for the bottom line. On the Duke campus, a 2007 roof replacement used forward-thinking design to divert 718 tons of solid waste. Salvaged materials from this effort included 296,000 board feet of XPS insulation, which was repurposed in new roofing construction on three Duke buildings. It\u2019s our story. And it\u2019s simply good business.<\/p>\n It has been said \u201carchitecture is storytelling.\u201d The story of our 2007 roof replacement project settled forever how Duke University Health System will conduct itself in regard to sustainable roofing design and environmental stewardship. We distilled our story into the following \u201cGuiding Principles of Sustainable Roofing\u201d:<\/p>\n Through the years, these guiding principles have produced a dramatic improvement in roofing performance on our campus. In particular, our emphasis on adaptive reuse of materials will minimize our impact on the environment, as well as reduce future demand on hospital resources\u2013resources best used in support of outstanding patient care or cancer research, not funding a premature roof replacement. Interestingly, the U.S. General Services Administration<\/a>, Washington, D.C., has recently incorporated our guiding principles in facilities standards for future public building construction. Now our story has legs.<\/p>\n In April 2013, I attended the Energy Efficient Roofing Conference in Charlotte. I was invited to participate in the program, offering a building owner\u2019s perspective about emerging roofing technologies. The focus, primarily, was energy-efficient roofing as a value proposition: how to achieve it and how to sell it. The format leaned heavily on panel discussions, which produced large amounts of banter and at times outright tension regarding the subjects at hand. It was as if someone handed a microphone to the elephant in the room. Has the proposition become a \u201csolution\u201d in search of a \u201cproblem\u201d?<\/p>\n Don\u2019t misunderstand; everyone can see the benefits in much (but not all) of the new energy-efficient roofing innovations and building codes. But should we be excited about reflective or solar membranes on massively thick R-30 minimum insulation while still far too many roof installations will fail prematurely because of shortsighted design and construction? If quality and durability are of utmost value, do you\u2014the roofing contractor\u2014 know how to achieve it and how to sell it? Should you care?<\/p>\n Back in 2006, I believed everyone was trying to \u201cout green\u201d each other; durability be damned. Today, I wonder if the problem is that everyone wants to \u201cout innovate\u201d each other. As we\u2019ve witnessed with green, the danger when innovation means everything is that it can soon mean nothing.<\/p>\n Innovation is exciting and necessary, but so is refinement. Refinement may be the most powerful strategy of all, yet it remains under emphasized. The most effective way to celebrate refinement is by creating new stories\u2013new institutional memories. Roofing contractor, you are the biographer. Run with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In March 2006, I swore allegiance to the wildly popular green-building movement. I even put the kibosh on my favorite joke about recycling in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[26,30],"tags":[176,205,254,252,251,253,173],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n