Why All New Buildings Should Be Eco-Friendly - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages Besides, there is a general perception that developing eco-friendly building means disregard for aesthetic values. As a result, eco-friendly buildings are still not so widespread.
The costs of developing an eco-friendly building vary from building to building; most of them are more costly than conventional buildings. For instance, in order to minimise the effects on environment, the risk mitigation fee of eco-friendly buildings is near three times higher than it is of conventional ones, as well as the overheads during construction are up to four times more (Newell 2008). Beside these costly inputs, the chief obstacle which causes investors are costly home and commercial property integration of energy efficient technologies which do not offer returns to the investors. Obviously, the owners will save their energy fee from these technologies but the builders can only balance these inputs by selling in higher prices which may cause losing the potential customers consequently. Another problem related to cost efficiency is that the market perceives the cost of capital and construction of eco-friendly building increase significantly as standards are established. Before a new eco-friendly building could be put on the market, it has to be scrutinized by rigid criterion to be qualified as eco-friendly; this entails more money spending on building maintenance. For example, in Australia, it takes more than one year to be certified as “Green Star” which is a standard launched by Green Building Council Australia (GBCA), and about 8 percent of total financial investment have to be paid for advertising, management and equipments maintaining during this period (Newell 2008).
However, in the long run, the return of eco-friendly buildings will out performs the cost invested (Kozlowski 2003 in Miller and Buys 2008). ...Download file to see next pagesRead More