commentICC Announces Plan for Green Construction Code
Code ready standards such as Standard 189 may have some serious competition. In collaboration with The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), the International Code Council (ICC) recently announced its new International Green Construction Code (IGCC) initiative. The result of the initiative will be “IGCC: Safe and Sustainable By the Book,” a stand-alone green code for new and existing commercial buildings.
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The committee formed to draft IGCC will hold public meetings and hopes to have a draft by the end of 2010. “This code effort,” said David Eisenberg, one of 29 drafting committee members, “[will be] developed in time for it to be part of the 2012 family of I-codes.” The code will reference existing efforts such as Standard 189 and will also be compatible with the carbon-neutrality goals of AIA’s 2030 initiative.
The IGCC initiative is designed to use existing sustainability efforts to shift the focus of all codes to green and high-performance building. The code committee will ask for input from a wide range of experts, including code officials, architects, standards experts, contractors, building owners, and tradespersons. This will, according to ICC, not only reduce code-related confusion within the industry but also promote a higher rate of adoption and enforcement.
Just how broad the committee’s view of green building will be remains to be seen, but Eisenberg notes that whatever the committee does will have lasting effects: “What we produce is going to have a big impact [on] what happens next, and if we build on the wrong foundational assumptions, it will be harder to build something that will actually get us where we need to be.”
Eisenberg hopes the committee will include provisional lifecycle assessment of buildings in the code, as well as requirements supporting the concept of passive survivability. He also wants to design the code to incorporate “performance goals with the idea of enabling the best rather than merely preventing the worst outcomes.”
More specific information about the work of the committee will be available to the public after the first meeting concludes at the end of July, with a draft being anticipated for public comment in April 2010.
Copyright 2009 by BuildingGreen, LLC
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