At Trilogy we make every effort, within the confines of our clients wishes, to design sustainably. This is not new theory or practice to us, but something we have been doing for 13 years. In fact, our first home built more than a decade ago, would still rank even today as one of the most energy efficient in all of Summit County, Colorado.
The intention of sustainable design is to reduce the impact of design and that which results from it, on the planet and or environment. From Wikipedia comes the following list of sustainable design principles:
- Low-impact materials: choose non-toxic, sustainably produced or recycled materials which require little energy to process
- Energy efficiency: use manufacturing processes and produce products which require less energy
- Quality and durability: longer-lasting and better-functioning products will have to be replaced less frequently, reducing the impacts of producing replacements
- Design for reuse and recycling: “Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial ‘afterlife’.”[3]
- Design Impact Measures for total carbon footprint and life-cycle assessment for any resource used are increasingly required and available. Many are complex, but some give quick and accurate whole-earth estimates of impacts. One measure estimates any spending as consuming an average economic share of global energy use of 8,000btu per dollar and producing CO2 at the average rate of 0.57 kg of CO2 per dollar (1995 dollars US) from DOE figures.[4]
- Sustainable Design Standards and project design guides are also increasingly available and are vigorously being developed by a wide array of private organizations and individuals. There is also a large body of new methods emerging from the rapid development of what has become known as ‘sustainability science’ promoted by a wide variety of educational and governmental institutions.
- Biomimicry: “redesigning industrial systems on biological lines … enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles…”[5]
- Service substitution: shifting the mode of consumption from personal ownership of products to provision of services which provide similar functions, e.g., from a private automobile to a carsharing service. Such a system promotes minimal resource use per unit of consumption (e.g., per trip driven).[6]
- Renewability: materials should come from nearby (local or bioregional), sustainably managed renewable sources that can be composted when their usefulness has been exhausted.
- Robust eco-design: robust design principles are applied to the design of a pollution sources).[7]
Ways that we at Trilogy Design sustainably would include
- Use of reclaimed and recycled materials
- Use of robust, long lasting materials such as timber frame and engineered structural materials
- Sourcing of materials: If at all possible we choose materials that are manufactured in a geographical radius of no more than 500 miles
- Energy Efficiency : We produce highly energy efficient dwellings through the use of technologies such as Structural Insulating Panels and cold roof systems.
- We encourage the use of passive and active energy reduction technologies and systems. Many if not most of our current builds incorporate passive solar, geothermal, and/or solar panel systems.
- We ask our clients to think carefully about their space requirements so we are building dwellings properly sized for function.
Here’s a question we ask all of our clients. Would you be willing to pay 5-10% more to build a home that was 50% less impactful on the environment? How would you answer that question?
