October 29, 2020 Make Your Build More Eco-Friendly

When it comes to saving money and saving the environment, there are many ways that you can make your construction build more eco-friendly.

Making your business more eco-friendly helps more than just the environment. Eco-friendly practices save you and your customers’ money and can save you from having a negative impact on the world. In addition, many people seek out companies that have environmentally friendly practices, so you may have a bigger audience to market your services to. Whether you work in the $29 trillion market for residential real estate or the $10 trillion commercial real estate market, making your construction business environmentally friendly is beneficial. Here are some tips for making your projects more eco-friendly.

Insulate Well

Making sure that your buildings are insulated well will help save on energy costs. Proper insulation keeps the inside of a building at the desired temperature without the outside leaking in. The less energy that the HVAC system in a building has to use to be effective, the better for the environment your build can be.

Use Energy Efficient Appliances

Energy efficient appliances are an easy way to make your builds more environmentally friendly. Energy Star is one brand that you can trust to have quality products that are going to reduce energy usage and therefore save money and the environment.

Water Saving Fixtures

Water fixtures can easily waste water if they have small leaks or if they are using more water than actually necessary. Toilets are a huge water waster, so choosing to install toilets that have multiple flush options can help you save water by not using it when it is not needed. In addition, make sure that everything installed is built to last to ensure there won’t be water-wasting leaks any time soon. Advice those living or working in your building to keep up with plumbing checks to save from wasting water.

Use Recycled Material

One of the first things that comes to many people’s minds when they think of being environmentally friendly is using recycled materials. There are different levels of recycling though, so make sure that you are using the form that works best for your project and the environment.

Reusing materials is the most eco-friendly type of recycling since there is no energy wasted in reforming a material from one form to another. If there is any sort of existing structure or material that you can use on a worksite, that is immediately the most environmentally friendly option. For example, if your team is remodeling a house and the flooring is salvageable, keeping it in and just performing small repairs or refinishing as needed is more environmentally friendly than installing a brand new flooring and throwing out the current one.

New materials that are made of recycled materials are the next most eco-friendly option. Though there is still energy that goes into recycling materials, it is better to recycle something and form it into something new as opposed to throwing it away. Anything that stops the creation of more waste is usually going to be an environmentally friendly practice.

Use Locally Sourced Materials

No matter what kind of material you’re using, you should try to cut down on the distance that something needs to travel before ending up in your build. Not only will sourcing your products from nearby help your local economy, but it will also reduce the amount of pollution and waste created in the traveling and shipping process. Many times there will be an option nearby that you can use instead of shipping things to your location from far and wide, so try to choose that option whenever it is available to you.

Design With Location in Mind

When you are creating your construction blueprints, also called construction plans or construction drawings, you should keep in mind on your two-dimensional drawing what the placement of your building means. Having windows that face the East or West, for example, means that there will be direct sunlight coming into your building. Direct sunlight can mean higher cooling costs in the Summer, which is not as energy efficient as possible. If you’re constructing a building from scratch, trying to angle the building to get enough light to have a happy environment without so much light that it has a negative impact on the energy systems is important. Even if you are saving money by using modular materials, which can reduce construction costs by 9% to 20%, you can still place your build in a way that will help airflow, light, and heat transfer to make the building as environmentally friendly as possible.

If you keep these tips in mind, your build should be much more eco-friendly and have less of a negative environmental impact. Do you have any other tips on how to be eco-friendly in your builds? Did you try any of these tips out? Let us know below.

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