Most green home building programs strive to create healthier homes by providing high indoor air quality, along with conserving energy and reducing environmental impact. But the National Center for Healthy Housing (NCHH), a national non-profit dedicated to creating safe and healthy homes for children, would like to see green home building programs focus more on safety, injury prevention, and cleanability as important components of a healthy indoor environment.
Recently, the NCHH released “How Healthy are National Green Building Programs?”, which compared four national green home building and indoor air quality programs with its own healthy housing principles—dry, clean, ventilated, safe, contaminant-free, pest-free, and maintained—to evaluate how well the programs protect residents from elements in the home that affect health, including accidental injuries.
“We see a wave of interest in green building, which we’re very enthusiastic about because that adds to a home’s healthiness,” says Rebecca L. Morley, NCHH’s executive director. “We wanted to evaluate claims that green building programs give out about green homes being healthier. We wanted to see if they are all created equal” and make sure consumers understand the differences between the programs.
NCHH reviewed Enterprise Community Partner’s Green Communities Criteria, the NAHB’s National Green Building Standard (still awaiting ANSI approval), the EPA’s Indoor Air Package for Energy Star Homes, and the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) LEED for Homes rating system.
None of the green building programs were given a perfect score. The Green Communities Criteria earned an overall grade of B+, as did EPA’s Indoor Air Package component. USGBC’s LEED for Homes earned a B-, and NAHB’s Green Building Standard (which the report mistakenly refers to as the Green Home Building Guidelines) earned a D. All of the programs failed to meet NCHH’s “clean” and “safe” recommendations, and a few also fell short in the areas of “dry,” “contaminant-free,” and “pest-free.” According to Morley, the programs scored lower when criteria were optional rather than required and because none of them emphasize injury prevention.
Home safety, injury prevention, and maintaining a clean environment are generally considered to be the homeowner’s responsibility. The Green Communities Criteria requires developers and builders to address these health components in an owners’ operation and maintenance manual, not during design and construction, according to the program’s senior director, Dana Bourland.
Although it has not completed its review of NCHH’s report, the NAHB believes there has been some confusion between its Green Home Building Guidelines and its National Green Building Standard, and it is working to clarify the differences with NCHH, according to Calli Schmidt, NAHB’s director of environmental communications.
The EPA advises consumers to fully research green building programs and to evaluate homes based on their actual features, not on “healthy home” marketing claims alone. Likewise, it is important for professionals involved in green home building to evaluate the criteria or programs they use and understand how the homes they build can impact the health of their clients.
Download the full report from the NCHH’s Web site.
