{"id":4697,"date":"2012-01-26T15:19:47","date_gmt":"2012-01-26T22:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unrbep.org\/?p=4697"},"modified":"2012-01-26T15:19:47","modified_gmt":"2012-01-26T22:19:47","slug":"report-retrofits-more-green-than-new-builds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/report-retrofits-more-green-than-new-builds\/","title":{"rendered":"Report: Retrofits \u2018More Green\u2019 than New-Builds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.environmentalleader.com\/2012\/01\/26\/report-retrofits-more-green-than-new-builds\/\" target=\"_blank\">From Environmental Leader<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Renovating old buildings is better for the environment than building new structures, according to a report by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.<\/p>\n<p>According to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.preservationnation.org\/issues\/sustainability\/green-lab\/lca\/The_Greenest_Building_lowres.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">The Greenest building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse,<\/a>\u00a0renovating an existing historic office building in Chicago reduces the building\u2019s impact on climate change by up to 12 percent when compared to constructing a new building. Results vary by climatic zone, so refitting an office building in Portland, Ore., reduces that impact by up to 16 percent, the report said.<\/p>\n<p>This impact on climate change versus a new \u201cgreen\u201d building is due to the immense amount of carbon expended \u2013 on things such as new materials and transportation of said materials \u2013 at the start of a new building project. The report says that it can take between 10 to 80 years for a new energy-efficient building to overcome, through efficient operations, the climate change impacts created by its construction.<\/p>\n<p>Scale matters, so much so, that retrofitting, rather than demolishing and replacing, just 1 percent of the city of Portland\u2019s office buildings and single family homes over the next ten years would help to meet 15 percent of their county\u2019s total CO2 reduction targets over the next decade, the report says.<\/p>\n<p>In December, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.environmentalleader.com\/2011\/12\/21\/minnesota-retrofits-to-save-3m-a-year\/\" target=\"_blank\">retrofit projects across 36 facilities<\/a>\u00a0that it says will generate more than $3 million in permanent, ongoing energy savings every year for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n<p>The improvements targeted commercial, industrial, and nonprofit facilities across the state. Such facilities account for half of the state\u2019s energy use, and retrofitting offered the Commerce Department what it called the \u201cbiggest bang for our buck.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Environmental Leader Renovating old buildings is better for the environment than building new structures, according to a report by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. According to\u00a0The Greenest building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse,\u00a0renovating an existing historic office building in Chicago reduces the building\u2019s impact on climate change by up to 12 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/report-retrofits-more-green-than-new-builds\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Report: Retrofits \u2018More Green\u2019 than New-Builds<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4698,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697\/revisions\/4698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unrbep.org\/dealerportal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}