As to "Living Buildings"

I am perfectly happy to let the chips fall where they may but at the outset I am curious why it is "more green" to have, say, an on-site sewage-teatment system that one which is community- or even region-wide? That's implicit in "living building" philosophy. But where are the numbers? On what basis do we assume or state that it is better?

I can concede that using natural rainfall for use on site makes sense. Or that treating storm-water run-off on-site makes sense ecologically. (It can also be a cheaper, too.)

But there are economies of scale in many human activities and I would expect to see them in waste-treatment as well.

There's another element. It would seem that the living buildings goal would limit the size of buildings. If you are going to rely on natural rainfall to supply drinking water for an apartment building, that would limit the number of apartments you can handle on a site or encourage spreading out ("sprawling") over larger areas.

It might work and be effective but color me skeptical at this point.

via www.scientificamerican.com

Comments

[Brian M]

What always amuses me are the wealthy yuppies who choose to live in a huge mansion on a ten acre exurban lot 15 minutes from anything while burbling about how green their solar panel emncrusted mansion is!

[JRoth]

I take your point about economies of scale, and have no particular brief for living buildings, but the argument I would make for them is that it forces a building project to internalize all its costs, to live within its own eco-budget, if you will.

Because our system is out of whack - carbon unpriced, water pollution underpriced, infrastructure chronically underfunded and failing - it's all too easy to take as given solutions that are really buck-passing. As an example, I live in Pittsburgh, where water is plentiful and electricity is mostly from coal plants. As a result, I am much more careful about conserving the latter than the former. If I lived in a part of Arizona served by solar, my priorities would flip. But I'd bet that the difference in prices - how the market tells me to act - is not commensurate with the underlying costs in either location.

You design a building connected to city sewage, and the budget for that becomes part of the building's operating costs, in all likelihood at a price lower than the overall impact. Which means that you "buy" too much sewage. But by treating it yourself, there's no illusion about the cost of treatment, and so you "buy" less sewage, through graywater reuse or whatever.

Arguably it all comes back to the fundamental problem that individual virtue* is not going to save the world; proper pricing could.

* although I do believe in personal virtue, if only because you should do what you can, even in the absence of better price signals.

[Emerson Paynode]

Using storm water to supply drinking water to an apartment buildings is quite practical. However, the system in this plan should be well-maintained. After all, what's the use of practicality when people's health would be put at risk?