Sustainability and the Building Codes

A paper for the Joint Technical Meeting of the National Conference of States on Building Codes and Standards (NCSBCS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

September 4, 1997, Reston, Virginia
by David Eisenberg, Executive Director
Development Center for Appropriate Technology (DCAT)

I want to start with this premise: Building codes are based on a societal decision that it is important to protect the health and safety of people from the built environment. If, inadvertently, the codes are actually jeopardizing the health and safety of everyone on the planet by ignoring their impacts on resources and the environment, resulting in the destruction of the ecosystems that sustain us, we are obligated to re-invent the codes with that larger perspective.

Sustainability has been defined as the state in which we are able to meet our current needs without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Though there are other definitions, I use it to represent the ability of whole systems to remain healthy and continue indefinitely. I also acknowledge that in cosmic terms, nothing may be sustainable by this definition, but it serves well enough to talk about activities in terms of human generations. I also don't mean to imply that simply sustaining or maintaining destructive human patterns of behavior would fit the definition. My preference would be for the terms "restorative" or "regenerative", but since they are even less widely understood or used, I will stick with "sustainable".

I start with this larger view of the consequences of codes because it provides a crucial and typically missing context for looking at building codes and the regulation of design, construction and development. The absence of this context has led us to ignore many of the real, though unintentional, consequences of our building codes and regulations. A large amount of work has been done to document the environmental, economic, and social impacts of the built environment, yet little has been done to assess building codes from this point of view.

In one sense, building codes represent the embodiment of our accumulated knowledge and understanding of materials and how to safely use them to build structures. In another way, though, they exist as a disembodied data set - definitions, prescriptions, rules, and tables - developed and evolved through a process which has a very strong internal logic, but ignores the consequences which fall outside the concern for the physical health and safety of people in or near individual buildings.

We must learn to integrate into the design, construction, and regulatory processes, an awareness of the real impacts that our decisions have. Rather than ignore the enormous complexity of these impacts, we should acknowledge that we can't fully comprehend them and begin to base our actions on the idea of reducing the level of unintended consequences.

In reality, everything is connected to everything else. Everything we do affects everything else. But the connections are often subtle and cumulative, making the majority of the consequences invisible to us and therefore unintentional. Throw a stone in the ocean and you can see the splash and maybe a few ripples, but you can't tell anything has happened. But it has affected the whole ocean. Our use of ever higher levels of technology enables us to throw the equivalent of huge boulders into the ocean with the same lack of awareness of the consequences.

In the context of unintended impacts, appropriate technology could be defined as the lowest level of technology that will do well what needs to be done, as opposed to our cultural bias to use the highest level of technology that we think we can afford. A good basic principle would be to always act in ways that reduce the level of unintended consequences.

Building codes have continuously evolved toward the use of higher levels of technology, and almost exclusively, industrially processed materials. This has greatly amplified the unintended consequences of building. Codes and regulations, and the processes for their development and modification, lack mechanisms to address this problem, in part because the problem hasn't been recognized. The industrial basis for product and code development drives the system continually away from low-impact, local alternatives and towards high-impact, less-sustainable materials and systems.

Though the consequences are enormous, building codes ignore where resources come from, how efficiently they're used, or whether they can be reused at the end of the useful life of a structure. They ignore environmental impacts of resource acquisition or depletion, transportation, manufacturing processes, disposal after use, embodied energy of materials, or contribution to global warming. Though resource issues are often identified as being at the heart of developing sustainable patterns for building and development, they are totally absent from building codes.

Why is this important? Buildings account for one fourth of the world's wood harvest, two fifths of its material and energy usage, one sixth of its fresh water usage. In the past 100 years the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen 27%, one quarter of which has come from burning fossil fuels just to provide energy for buildings. During the same period, the world lost 20% of its forests. This is at a point when only two billion of the nearly six billion people on the planet live and work in modern resource-intensive buildings. The projection is that in fifty years, it will be four times that many (figures from World Watch Paper #124).

Consider the implications of that. Apply the level of resource intensity that is, essentially, required by our modern building codes in the US to the world population and it becomes apparent that it is not even remotely possible to house that number of people in this manner, with the available resources. What do we do about that? One strategy would be to find ways to include non-manufactured, indigenous materials and building systems into the codes.

There is a long and telling history of the battles between the building regulatory system and proponents of both traditional and improved low-cost, low-tech, and low impact building systems. This is often in the shadow of indigenous buildings which are hundreds and even thousands of years old. How did the indigenous, natural or low tech materials and building systems, which have been used for thousands of years, get relegated to the status of "alternative" materials and methods? In many climates, the indigenous buildings are far more comfortable and have far fewer negative impacts and costs than the modern buildings that have replaced them.

We need to learn to use the resources we have in abundance, and which have the lowest impacts. Our cultural bias keeps us from thinking we have anything to learn from "primitive" building systems, though many were brilliant and elegant examples of appropriate technology. We have an obligation to manage our limited resources on this planet so that we proceed down a sustainable course...we do not have the option of "outlawing" the most sustainable approaches to building. Yet, the lack of a larger context in code development and application has allowed this regulatory type of "mismanagement" of resources to pass unnoticed and unquestioned for decades. These are the issues of the next century and the next millennium. They will impose themselves on us whether we ignore them now or not.

The issues of sustainable building extend beyond these resource-based problems. They include the toxicity of the processes through which materials are extracted, manufactured, and used. Only recently have the health effects of buildings themselves, rather than their failures from fire or structural flaws, been acknowledged. The economic, social, and cultural impacts are quite profound, as well. There is also the question of treating all buildings as though they require the same level of technological sophistication, regardless of use, location, owner preference, cost, or impact. Variations in existing codes, which are largely the result of different types of occupancy, are relatively minor in almost all cases.

If we truly believe that the preservation of health and safety is the real and legitimate purpose of building codes, then we must address these larger issues. Should the health and safety of a relatively small number of specific individuals in or around a specific building, be of a higher order of importance than the well-being of all of us, including the other living inhabitants with whom we share the earth?

The process for change involves developing awareness of the real impacts and consequences of what codes demand in the design and construction of buildings. We shouldn't ignore the fact that modern building codes were initially developed by insurance interests and have been influenced heavily by the industries that produce the materials and building systems which are regulated by the codes. We also must recognize that major insurance underwriters and re-insurers around the world are taking very seriously the threat posed by global warming, changing patterns in the intensity and frequency of storms, and how that relates to their exposure to risk. Potential losses resulting from sea level rise as a result of global warming are, all by themselves, sufficient to force them to begin to address this issue in a serious way.

The preservation of capital investment in buildings, and the reduction of liability exposure for designers, engineers, manufacturers, suppliers, builders, and owners are powerful forces as well, and have a legitimate place in this process. They do not, however, represent the same sort of moral authority in building codes as the health and safety aspects do, nor should they be dominant in the mission of organizations that create, modify and enforce those codes.

We need to develop a process to assess codes on the basis of whether they really preserve or threaten health and safety - whose, where, and at what levels. We will need to engage the best people with the fullest understanding of these issues, to develop a process for evaluating and integrating impacts, costs, benefits, and risks into the codes. We will need to create a different kind of wisdom about building design and regulation that is based on seeking an understanding of local and global outcomes. This is an enormously challenging idea and a much larger task.

There are also some encouraging signs. Some attention has been paid recently to the larger aspects of building codes. However, they are usually focused on specific themes such as the relative merits of prescriptive versus performance-based codes or the burden of codes in terms of their increasing complexity and the associated increases in time and expense for compliance. A degree of attention has been given to the role of codes as impediments to innovation, and more recently, to the challenges of staying current with new materials, as well as the lessons learned from failures and natural disasters.

This ongoing dialogue about the overall issues is much needed, and most encouraging is the development and increased adoption of model energy codes. These codes actually represent the first step toward a basis for codes not strictly limited to health and safety of the occupants of buildings. They exist as a result of the larger context that is absent elsewhere in the codes. Model energy codes are there to preserve health and welfare on a community or even larger level, rather than only for the individuals in the buildings. As we learn to factor this larger web of interrelationships into what we do, especially where the impact is so great, we will see large scale returns, even from incremental improvements.

The Development Center for Appropriate Technology is leading a team of organizations and individuals in focusing attention on the issue of sustainability and building codes. We are working toward an international conference which will focus on creating a common understanding of the current state of natural and human systems and on creating an integrated response to those realities in terms of the built environment. The goal is to serve as a catalyst for a change in awareness and to create a framework for this process.

We also seek to foster support for a national partnership for research, testing, and development of low-impact building materials and systems, to bring them into more common and practical usage within building codes. Since these materials and systems often lack a developed "industry" or profit base for their development and promotion, they can't attract the type of investment that proprietary materials and systems do, to pay for extensive research and testing. This is a legitimate role for governmental support and an area that the insurance industry, with its concern about global climate change, should also find reason to support.

There is already widespread recognition of the seriousness of this crisis, and it has already started to have an effect on the way the design and construction industries conduct their business. An excellent example is the process the Civil Engineering Research Foundation (CERF), an affiliate of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), has undertaken to incorporate sustainable development principles into the full spectrum of activities related to civil engineering. Changing the way buildings are designed and built starts with developing an awareness of the complexity of the relationships and impacts of what we do. While the challenges are of monumental proportions, we are not starting from zero in this endeavor. We must not be paralyzed by the difficulty of the task at hand, nor can we be lulled into thinking that it will happen without our committed, focused, long-term efforts.