Over the next few weeks I will be talking about the new craze thats hitting the world and that is “GOING GREEN”. With so mnay of us concerned about global warming and how we are now impacting our planet by the day to day running of our lives it is important to note a few things about what we can do to help.
I have decided to have a look into this and do some research. Going green in the context of Real Estate is one that we should start with. The G20 summit last week talked about how we can work on climate change. Thats how important it is seemed to be. But there ha to be a place to start. I believe this place is in our homes. If we can live in a home that is warmer and drier we can have added benifits to our lives that include 
less power consumption and healthier lifestyles and many other things.
We will be re looking back at the series I wrote on The New Zealand House and looking at each house to see how they can be made warmer, drier, and more sustainable to the environment. I will also cover if you a buiding a new home how you can make the most of a range of products out there.
Wikipedia’s web definition of Sustainable Housing is:
A sustainable building, or green building is an outcome of a design which focuses on increasing the efficiency of resource use — energy, water, and materials — while reducing building impacts on human health and the environment during the building’s lifecycle, through better siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and removal.[1]
Green buildings are designed to reduce the overall impact of the built environment on human health and the natural environment by:
- Efficiently using energy, water, and other resources
- Protecting occupant health and improving employee productivity
- Reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradation[2]
I like to look at sustainability as the concept of meeting the needs of today withou
t compromising the needs of future generations. This saying has been around for many years but in my view has been very slowly uptaken in the sector of housing.
It is my opinion that we have some of the poorest quality homes here in New Zealand compared to other countries that we usually class as equal to us. Recently I was looking at some homes for some of my university friends of mine to rent out for the year. There were so many houses to choose from. We went through probably 50 homes in two weeks to find something that fitted the needs of everyone. But to be 
quite homest I was disgusted at the state of some of the homes.
There needs to be something done to both have newly built sustainable homes and have our exsisting homes turned into more eco greener homes. Some of the properties I looked at were colder inside than outside and had condensation problems, rot, mold, drafts…. you name it they exsisted. Its a shame that landlords have the cheek to offer people to live in these properties. They would make you ill.
Hopefully in the next few weeks I can point out what I believe is some of the key points that exsisting and new homes need to be more green. Like everything there is the two ends of the scale – hard out and conservative. I want to demonstrate more toward the conservative end of the scale what can be done simply to make a house a more greener healthier place to live.
If you have any ideas or comments please leave them as I would love to answer them.