Optimum Solutions for Green Buildings: A Life-Cycle Cost Perspective Considering Transport and Land Use and Ecology Credits

Abstract

Green building implementation is one of the common discussions nowadays. For a building to be identified as a green building, there are certain requirements that need to be fulfilled. In order to evaluate the extent to which these buildings comply with these requirements, green building rating tools were developed by many countries. Green Star is the commonly used green building rating tool in Australia. This rating tool has four sets of rating tools and Green Star Design and As Built version 1.1 is the rating tool used to evaluate newly constructed green buildings. There are nine key criteria identified by this rating tool and out of which transport key criterion and land use and ecology key criterion have a significant influence towards the type and location of the plot of land. Each of these key criterion is further divided in to credits and each of these credits gain credits points. To achieve a higher Green Star rating the green building should satisfy higher number of credits. However, when achieving these credits there are certain initial costs that the building should incur. Therefore, most of the researches illustrate that first cost premium acts as a barrier to the green building implementation. In contrary to that, green buildings incur costs as well as savings throughout the life-cycle. Therefore, initial decision making for green buildings should be focusing on the life-cycle cost building. As a result, this research aim to identify optimum solutions for transport and land use and ecology credits focusing on the life-cycle impact. This research used net present value (NPV) technique for life-cycle costing. Based on the life-cycle cost and higher value of credits points, this research reported optimum solutions for each key criterion. For transport credits 17B.1Acess by Public Transport’, ‘T17B.5 Walkable Neighbourhood’, T17B.4 Active Transport Facilities’ and ‘T17B.2 Reduced Car Parking Provisions’ are the four optimum solutions. For land use and ecology key criteria ‘L23.1 Ecological Value’, ‘L24.1 Reuse of land’ and ‘L25 Heat Island Effect Reduction’ are identified as optimum solutions. These optimum credits can be used in green building implementation.