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Introduction

Traditional building practices often overlook the interrelationships between a building, its components, its surroundings and its occupants. Typical buildings consume more of our resources than necessary, negatively impact the environment, and generate a large amount of waste. In United States residential and commercial buildings together use one- third of all the energy consumed, and two-thirds of all electricity used.

Further, buildings are a major source of the pollution that causes urban air quality problems, and the pollutants that contribute to climate change. They account for 49 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 25 percent nitrous oxide emissions, and 10 percent of particulate emissions, all of which damage urban air quality. Buildings produce 35 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions – the chief pollutant for climate change (1).

A team of a student and a faculty member from ----------------- department of --------------- -- evaluated some of the representative floors (building were chosen at random based on accessibility) according to the following green building characteristics against Commercial Interior (CI) standards of US Green Building Standard:

1. Sustainable Sites: This will include erosion control, alternative transportation, storm water management, light pollution reduction etc. 2. Water Efficiency: This will include discharge water, water efficient landscaping, innovative waste water technologies, water use reduction etc. 3. Energy and atmosphere: this may include energy performance, ozone protection, renewable energy, sustainable building cost impacts etc. 4. Materials and resources: This will include source reduction and waste management, construction, demolition, and renovation waste management, toxic material source reduction, use of alternative materials, sustainable cleaning products, etc. 5. Indoor Environmental Quality: This will include outside air introduction and exhaust systems, environmental tobacco smoke control, asbestos removal, PCB removal, outdoor air delivery monitoring , indoor chemical and pollutant source control, thermal comfort, day lighting, green cleaning etc.

Objectives

The objectives of this report were to introduce applied research to undergraduate students and to find out if the existing buildings may satisfy general acceptance standard of green buildings with reasonable upgrade. We used LEED –CI (LEED- Commercial Interior) standard to evaluate five existing building floors.

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Bandyopadhyay, A., & Lacourt, J. (2009, June), Evaluating Existing Buildings For Green Building Standards: A Senior Project Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--4784