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2.6. Sustainability assessment and targets
from Sustainable Design
by generaskopje
In order to measure the sustainability of a building, its performance and fulfillment of the various demanding criteria, several sustainability assessment methodologies and schemes are developed, such as: LEED (USA), BREEAM (UK), DGNB (Germany), Open House (EU) etc. They based on measurable indicators organized in categories. The sustainability assessment take into consideration the local specific conditions, climate, transport, energy source etc., and several of the sustainability assessment schemes provide adjustment of their measurement systems and indicators to the countries specifics. Within the EU, the most common ones are BREAM, followed by LEED, DGNB etc., and we will shortly outline some of them.
BREEAM
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BREEAM is launched in 1990 in the UK by The Building Research Establishment (BRE). The assessment system is based on a bottom–up methodology. The key criteria and features of BREEAM are structured hierarchically into Issues, Categories, and Criteria levels. At the top level, there are ten distinct issues (the maximum number of obtainable credits is shown in parentheses):
Management (22), Health & Well-being (14), Energy (30), Transport (9), Water (9), Materials (12), Waste (7), Land Use & Ecology (12), Pollution (13), and Innovation (10).
The fore mentioned issues consist of total of 69 categories, which are comprised of 114 criteria which need to be evaluated. The criteria are assigned a certain number of points which are aggregated per category. The points are weighted with predetermined factors in order to sum the final score. The maximum score in the BREEAM assessment is 100 points, with an additional 10 points for an extra category, which includes innovation criteria.
According to the number of points achieved from the assessment, the buildings can be rated as:
unclassified (<30 points), pass (≥30 points), good (≥45 points), very good (≥55 points), excellent (≥70 points), and outstanding (≥85 points).
BREEAM provides possibilities to adapt the assessment to the specifics of different countries. It involves a local assessor, knowledgeable on the local specifics, who has a role as a consultant and an on-site auditor.
In the BREEAM for new-build domestic (international only) and non-domestic buildings environmental sections and assessment issues are:
