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REGREEN: Guidelines For Sustainable Residential Remodeling and Renovation

At last! Green resources for the long-neglected residential designers

Penny Bonda -- Interior Design, 11/19/2007 12:00:00 AM

In the green world, residential interior designers, remodeling contractors and consumers have felt as neglected as wallflowers at the senior prom. No more.

Enter REGREEN, the new resource for sustainable residential improvement projects. Jointly developed by the American Society of Interior Designers' Foundation and the U.S. Green Building Council, the REGREEN program provides best practice and environmentally responsible guidelines for design professionals, service providers, product suppliers and homeowners.

Though it complements the LEED for Homes rating system, it is not LEED. There are no points to earn or certification levels to achieve. What REGREEN offers are strategies, advice and examples for common residential remodeling project types—kitchen, bath and other interior and exterior living area renovations, finishing a basement, weatherizing, constructing a major addition or undertaking a gut rehab, and energy retrofits.

REGREEN is organized for use by the smallest projects and really large ones. Want to remodel the entire interior of a house? Turn to the gut rehab chapter to find a discussion of the integrated pre-design issues, a definition of the project scope, strategies listed by building system, and a case study with real life examples. Or perhaps all you'd like to do is replace the bathroom wallcovering. The Strategy Library offers suggestions on the greenest alternatives.

The Strategy Library is, perhaps, the heart of REGREEN, offering more than 200 (and growing) green design tactics. They are listed by the familiar and proven LEED categories—innovative design process, sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality. Browsing the table of contents will help users locate a specific strategy but also alert them to other related opportunities.

This is an important aspect of REGREEN, its focus on whole-house, systems thinking. As stated in the introduction, ". . . it is rarely a single product or building component or even a collection of attributes that result in a building being labeled green. Green building is almost always about how systems . . . work together to reduce environmental impacts." As such, the strategies are cross-listed in several ways - by project type, environmental category and as part of the potential issues to be considered in each section.

Currently REGREEN consists of a paper-based guidelines manual that will eventually evolve into an electronic, web-based interactive tool. It will also expand to include instructor-led and web-based learning programs, delivered to the various targeted audiences, including consumers. Other print and electronic resources will follow, such as links to the many regionally based home building programs whose work helped inform the guidelines.

ASID's Sustainable Design Council conceptualized this project in response to requests from its residential design specialty members, who quite frankly, had a right to feel both ignored and puzzled. USGBC and others, including ASID, had been concentrating on developing green resources for commercial markets; yet, a 2005 Harvard University study showed that the residential remodeling market is huge. The $220 billion spent by homeowners on improvement projects that year alone accounted for over 40 percent of all residential construction and nearly two percent of the U.S. economy.

Also in 2005, ASID commissioned a survey that found six out of 10 U.S. homeowners willing to consider integrating sustainable design practices into a future home improvement project provided those enhancements were cost-competitive. Consumers were also becoming more aware of the health benefits of green buildings as well as the money savings associated with energy use reductions.

The time was obviously right and ASID found a logical and enthusiastic partner in USGBC. Although it's not a LEED-branded product, REGREEN is following much of the established development model used by the LEED rating systems. ASID and USGBC formed a steering committee and invited experts from the green residential remodeling community to a retreat to begin to give shape to the project. The guidelines are the result of that effort and the subsequent work of a team from BuildingGreen (yes, those fabulous folks who bring you Environmental Building News and GreenSpec).

REGREEN is still a work in progress and its next iteration is up to you. ASID and USGBC have posted the draft version of the guidelines and invite the public to comment. USGBC will respond to all comments, and post the comments and responses (without commenter names or organizations) online on the same site. The survey will ask you to comment on the technical aspects and organizational structure of REGREEN. You will have an opportunity to add strategies and suggest changes and clarifications. The comment period endsDecember 10, 2007.

This is a terrific chance to participate in the process, and the more of you who do, the better the final product will be. The final version of REGREEN will be released at ASID's Interiors 08 conference March 13-16 in New Orleans. Caveat alert! The word "final" is to be used cautiously. Just like the LEED rating systems, REGREEN will always be a work in progress to be improved and upgraded as users like you contribute to its content.

At least, however, the wallflowers have begun to dance!