Interesting

http://marketinggreen.wordpress.com

Do 'Green' buildings have a real payoff?

I cam across this post on the blog of Jason Kottke - and it is certainly worth considering:

Constructing new 'green' buildings is all well and good, but if they're further from your workers' homes and you have to tear down perfectly good old buildings to do so, the hoped-for energy savings are wasted.

Embodied energy. Another term unlovely to the ear, it's one with which preservationists need to get comfortable. In two words, it neatly encapsulates a persuasive rationale for sustaining old buildings rather than building from scratch. When people talk about energy use and buildings, they invariably mean operating energy: how much energy a building -- whether new or old -- will use from today forward for heating, cooling, and illumination. Starting at this point of analysis -- the present -- new will often trump old. But the analysis takes into account neither the energy that's already bound up in preexisting buildings nor the energy used to construct a new green building instead of reusing an old one. "Old buildings are a fossil fuel repository," as Jackson put it, "places where we've saved energy."

If embodied energy is taken into consideration, a new building that's replaced an older building will take up to 65 years to start saving energy...and those buildings aren't really designed to last that long.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with the publisher of the Dog & Lemon Guide recently about the environmental benefits of hybrid cars. Aside from issues about simply adding another vehicle to the national fleet, rather than decommissioning your previous vehicle, a Toyota Prius is no more fuel efficient than a Morris Minor from the 1950s. If you overlay Kottke's assertions about green building and the carbon cost of developing, manufacturing and marketing the Prius, it would make more environmental sense to operate a well maintained Morris Minor than to jump aboard the bandwagon.

The Greendex

National Geographic magazine have developed an index of countries in the world that are more sustainable.

You can also calculate your personal sustainability ranking with a simple interactive questionnaire.

GreenDex Survey of Sustainability