Whether you’re designing a completely new building for an open plot of land or making modifications to an existing structure, you should keep sustainability in mind. Finding ways to lessen our impact on the environment is important in just about every industry today. This is because people are more aware of the ecological disturbances that they cause in construction, as well as the energy and resource consumption. By learning how to optimize a building site’s sustainable potential, you can create a property that is in line with the eventual user’s goals. For a typical office building, for example, eco-friendliness can be a major draw for tenants. We cover some ideas here that you can use to guide your decisions when thinking about how to build on a property.
Retrofit Existing Structures When Possible
Retrofitting existing structures on a building site is a great way to save materials and also avoid upsetting land that is presently untouched. Before expanding, relocating, or creating new structures, therefore, you should try to go for renovating buildings that are already standing. Land that has already been used in some way, but is unused now is also a good option for starting a new construction. While the building that you use as a foundation may be old when you decide to retrofit, its framework will in most cases still be viable today. You will need to focus on upgrading certain details to modernize its energy efficiency, though. The HVAC system, windows and doors, and insulation can all be targets of replacement to minimize heat transfer. New LED light fixtures may also be necessary, since they’ll last longer and utilize much less energy than incandescent lights.
Additionally, retrofitting can extend to the parking area of a building. To illustrate, you can improve a parking garage by installing a semi-automatic parking system in it. While the overall structure of the garage would remain the same, you would be able to increase the number of cars that it can contain. The semi-automatic parking system would hold vehicles in vertical spaces between the floor and ceiling of a single level in the garage, doubling its capacity without requiring further land development.
Orient Buildings To Reduce Energy Needs
The orientation of a building can greatly influence its day-to-day energy needs. As you plan a building, you should seek to create a layout that will passively take advantage of natural sunlight and wind. In practice, this would mean facing large windows in directions where the sun will come directly over them. With more natural light available, people in the building will not need to turn on electrical lights for the majority of the day and waste energy unnecessarily. If overheating and subsequent excessive use of air conditioning is a concern, you can also intersperse trees around the building to provide some shade to those areas most prone to becoming hot.
Thinking about wind patterns in the area and that result from surrounding structures is also important as you try to craft a comfortable interior environment where energy use remains at a minimum. Having central areas in a multistory building that lack floor and ceiling separation is ideal. This is because they will allow hot air from rooms on each floor to move upward toward the roof, where vents can allow it to escape. An example of such a central area could be a staircase.
Take Steps To Minimize Soil Erosion
Soil erosion is a primary concern for the outside areas around the property that you’re working on. You can prevent wind-based erosion and runoff due to precipitation by planting native vegetation. Trees, shrubs, grasses, and other plants will hold soil in place with their roots. Going for native species is helpful for sustainability because native plant species will have adaptations that allow them to survive in your region without calling for a large amount of water. When the building site is one that has slopes, erosion control becomes more challenging, since the force of gravity will tend to pull soil down and away. In these types of locations, creating several steps of flat land with retaining walls can stabilize the ground.
You should also note that when minimizing erosion, you can also set systems in place to capture storm water in the ground. This will keep the water from picking up pollutants as it moves towards rivers or lakes nearby, while also decreasing its ability to carry away soil. You can accomplish this with pervious ground coupled with containers underground to hold and redirect water.
Limit the Amount of Impervious Surfaces
This naturally leads to the next point to consider when you’re thinking about how to optimize a building site’s sustainable potential, which is limiting the amount of impervious surfaces present. Impervious surfaces describe the exteriors of pavement and buildings themselves. These are disruptive to the environment because they absorb and retain more heat than areas covered in natural vegetation, leading to urban heat islands where temperatures are higher than normal. Luckily, there are many ways to reduce this effect on your building site. For one, you can shade pathways leading from the parking area to the building with trees. Similarly, you could integrate a green roof on the building so that the plants can keep cool through their transpiration. Constructing a roof made of highly reflective materials is another option that will keep heat absorption to a minimum.
Generally trying to reduce the proportion of the site that has impervious surfaces is also a feasible course of action. You can significantly lower the lateral surface area that your parking lot or garage takes up by calling a parking lift manufacturer, namely Harding Steel, and implementing stack parking or automated parking systems. Stack parking systems and semi-automatic systems can allow you to fit more cars into a parking area without forcing you to develop more land. This can then leave more of the property free for you to landscape with plants or to leave undisturbed. Fully automated systems can fulfill the same function, and because some of them have vehicle storage spaces underground, you can truly diminish the amount of exposed impervious surfaces in the building site.
Support Eco-Friendly Transportation Through the Building
When you want to design it sustainably, the building and its parking areas should also support eco-friendly transportation. Instead of making room for regular cars only, you should create lanes that allow cyclists, pedestrians, and perhaps public transportation vehicles to easily arrive at the building. With an outside layout that accommodates people who choose alternatives to driving, you can ultimately decrease the greenhouse gases that employees and visitors create when commuting or otherwise traveling to the building. Including electric vehicle charging stations for staff members can also make the building more sustainable. You can build these into regular parking spaces, or even have a parking lift manufacturer include them in automated parking systems. With charging stations, the use of electric vehicles that don’t give off harmful exhaust can become more feasible for many people as they go to work.
As you search for methods to maximize the sustainability potential of building sites that you’re working on, you should get in touch with Harding Steel. We’re a parking lift manufacturer that provides clients with state-of-the-art mechanical and automated parking solutions. As you have seen here, parking lifts and automated systems can allow you to use space more efficiently on a property so you can revitalize old structures and devote more land to vegetation. They even support green modes of transport, making them highly useful in the context of eco-friendliness.
