The Green Building Concept: Is it a Trend?

Abstract

The building industry is an important contributing element to the economy of the country. Evidence revealed that the building industry has contributed to the environmental impact in so many ways. Realizing this important role played by the building industry, most building projects have now adopted the concept of green building. In Malaysia, the green building concept has been gradually initiated into the building industry. Reference to the Green Building Index (GBI Malaysia) database shows an increasing number of buildings being certified day by day. Not only that, the green building concept indicated a positive escalation especially within the commercial and residential property sectors. In conjunction with the growing number of green buildings in Malaysia, several questions have arisen; one of which is whether this is just a passing trend or is it because of the benefits received from it. Therefore, this study is conducted mainly to investigate the reasoning behind the corporation’s involvement in green building industry. This study used the qualitative method whereby, semi-structured interview has been chosen as the best data collection method. Seven participants from different sectors were selected to generalize the results. Results indicated that at the initial stage of involvement in green building concept, most of the corporations were in it for the trend and novelty of trailblazing the evolutions of the world building industry. It was only recently that green building concept is embedded by corporations due to the benefits they received which indirectly boosted their business operations. Nevertheless, the government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations still need to increase efforts to mould and embed the green culture for every Malaysian because the awareness level in the implementation of green building concept is still at an early stage.