Greenometer-7: A Tool to Assess the Sustainability of a Building's Life Cylce at the Conceptual Design Phase
Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: This study presents a tool that has been developed to measure and subsequently improve the sustainability performance of a building over its entire life-cycle while still at the conceptual design stage. This forecasting tool is called GREENOMETER-7. GREENOMETER-7 is a LCA tool and it evaluates the projected building at two levels: micro- and macro-assessment. The micro-assessment level provides in-depth analysis of the building products, components, and operations however, the macro-assessment level measures the sustainability performance of the building as a whole and covers areas that are not applicable at the product or component level. Both levels consist of categories and indicators. The micro-assessment level has 12 categories that fall into the following major areas: energy, water and wastewater, resources, contaminants, and economics. The macro-assessment level of GREENOMETER-7 has 7 categories. They are location, land use and land value, stormwater, heat-island and landscaping, water and wastewater, energy, resources, and environmental indoor quality (EIQ). The tool uses a 7-degree scale (0 to 6) to express sustainability performance, where 0 means extremely unsustainable, 3 means neutral and 6 means highly sustainable. The output is a score from 0 to 6 for the micro- and macro-assessment levels as well as for their categories and indicators. The micro-assessment level has three phases: inventory, impact assessment and interpretation. The inventory phase has two steps: hierarchy-analysis and "N" determination. The impact assessment phase has two steps: profiling and synthesis. Also, the interpretation phase has two steps: ranking and valuation (weighting). On the other hand, the macro-assessment level has two phases: inventory and interpretation. The inventory phase has two steps: macro-survey and macro-profile. The interpretation phase has two steps: ranking and valuation (weighting). The LEED scoring system is the predominant green building rating system in the United States. USGBC is in the process
Author: Muhammad Musa Mer'eb
Institution: Cleveland State University
Language: English
Subfield: Building and Construction
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2336393312