Campaigning for Better Building Codes

Matt Pearce
Campaign Specialist
U.S. Green Building Council

Earlier this month, USGBC launched our seventh and final campaign of the 2012 Advocacy Campaign Agenda: Build Better Codes. In this campaign, USGBC is calling on its community to actively engage in the greening of state and local building codes.

Building codes define a state or community’s minimum expectations for all buildings. As such, this campaign to build better, greener codes plays an important role in enabling market transformation towards a market norm of healthy, low-impact, responsible and efficient buildings and neighborhoods.

USGBC and many of its partners have long been active in developing a response to the demand for regulatory guidance for better, greener buildings. Building energy codes have filled some of the void, but fall far short of addressing the much broader spectrum of building-related risks to human and environmental health. State and local governments across the country will get their wish next week when the 2012 version of the International Green Construction Code (IgCC) is released. The IgCC, which includes ASHRAE Standard 189.1 as an optional path to compliance, serves to provide any code adopting body with the today’s best-available starting point for extending the benefits of green buildings to all buildings designed, built or renovated in a community.

With all this new material for code adopting bodies to consider – and many already are – USGBC’s Build Better Codes campaign calls on the full community of green building professionals to coach these codes from idea into reality. I hope you’ll join us in our effort to Build Better Codes.