Green Building Evaluation Research Based On Ecological Footprint Model

Construction industry is an important pillar industry relating to the national economy, and also has a huge role in promoting China’s economic development. However, during more than a decade of rapid development in the industry, itsdamage to the environment pollution and energy consumption should not be underestimated, making the development of green building and energy efficient building an urgent matter. There are other hills where stones are good for working jade. As the first industrialized countries, United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Japan have created a lot of sustainable development and green evaluation systems about architecture and residence, which mainly are qualitative assessment based on weight.While the subjectivity has been circumvented and weakened by mathematical means in the operation, but objectivity and comprehensiveness are still not convincing to some extent.How to quantitatively and objectively evaluate the ecological resource consumption of complex building projectremains an important issue.Ecological footprint, an analytical method emerging in1990s, has been widely applied to sustainability assessment of regions, industries and enterprises, but the application to construction industry is a more innovative attempt. Ecological footprint method showsthe human utilizationdegree of natural resources and the ecological environment. When applied to the green building, it treats the construction project as a calculation of the object, and uses Ingredients Method for the research object, treating all kinds of natural resources and energy expenditures, during the building construction and use processes, as consumptions, which are to be applied to classification and tracking calculation. By statistical processing, the consumptions can be converted into the corresponding ecological productive land area, and we can calculate the regional ecological carrying capacity for longitudinal and transverse comparisons. This article establishes an ecological footprint model in green building construction phase, an ecological footprint reduction model in operation phase, and an evaluation criterion to clearly determine whether a building fits the green building and energy efficient building standards.Partl,with domestic and internationalgreen building evaluation systems as the introduction, briefly introduces the present situation of ecological footprint theory research. Part2describes the ecological footprint in detail, including the theoretical basis, related concepts, etc.Part3and part4, the core parts of this paper, integrate theory with practice, as establishing the green building ecological footprint model and applying to instance analysis of the Dayoutianyuan project in Dalian, to get the final conclusion. Part5providessome implementation proposals of green building sustainable construction.This article provides a scientific quantitative evaluation method for the green building assessment. Firstly, we calculate and predictthe building ecological footprint reduction in the process of its use, namely the recovery and renewal ability of construction which can offset the environmental pressure during the period of use. As the buffering force of ecological footprint, the reduction and the regional ecological productive land supply constitute the ecological carrying capacity, being considered as Reaction Unit. Then, we calculate and predict the building ecological footprint in the process of construction, being considered as Pressure Unit. Finally, we calculate and predict whether a building makes large pressure and effects on the environment in construction and operation phases, by comparing the difference between pressure unit and reaction unit. If the ecological footprint reduction, realized by the green methods of the building, can balance the ecological deflect in construction phase, it meets the green building goals and is sustainable. Otherwise, it’s an ordinary building or high energy consumption building. We calculated and checked the Da you tian yuan project in Dalian, showing that the energy-saving, land-saving, water saving, and environmental protection measures taken in the design and operation phases had made a remarkable effect on ecological footprint reduction. Therefore, it met the green building standards in this paper. It quantifies the ecological resource consumption of construction projects in construction phase, compared with the regional ecological carrying capacity, and computes ecological footprint reduction conditions created by energy-saving, land-saving, water-saving and environmental protection measuresin operation phase, compared with the evaluation criteria. According to calculation, the Dayoutianyuan project in Dalian fits the green building standards. From the view of sustainable development of construction projects, we should on the one hand focus on reducing ecological footprint of the whole life cycle of a building, and on the other hand improving the regional ecological capacity. As the former implies, we shouldconsider environmental benefits during the entire process of building design, construction, operation, dismantling, and promoted materialization production, vigorously develop energy-efficient buildings, achieve construction waste minimization, while as the latter implies, we should achieve ecological reconstruction, development of circular economy, and increase the regional ecological carrying capacity.