Sustainable certification of buildings

Picture above: Illustration by P+P Arkitekter/Boligforeningen Ringgården.

The purpose of this decision note is to create a sustainable focus on renovations of existing residential buildings.

To create this focus, the deliverable describes a suggested method for evaluation of the sustainability by the means of different existing assessment tools with different levels of details. The suggested method consists of three steps:

  1. The process begins in the early process through dialogue to bring focus to sustainability with the client. This is carried out by the use of COWI’s sustainable dialogue tool.
  2. This is followed by a preliminary assessment on sustainability by the use of the simple excel-based evaluation tool MONITOR. This will give an early overview and bring more attention to sustainability. It will furthermore bring a direction on elements that needs more focus.
  3. It will end with the use of the local assessment scheme, in Denmark by the use of DGNB-DK, where points will be given on all relevant themes, where those without relevance will be taken out (meaning those without relevance will be taken out from max points, and the percentage of influence of the rest will be adjusted.

Figure 1 illustrates the process and the suggested steps towards a sustainability assessment.

Figure 1:              Illustration of suggested steps in the sustainability assessment process.

Do you want to know more? Please contact  Maja Grud Minzari, COWI, mgch@cowi.com, Tel.: +45 5640 1268