SICBA BuiltGreen™ Program a Huge Success 

After just over a year of operation, the SICBA BuiltGreen™ program has registered over a dozen homes, and certified about half that many, with several more due for completion in the next few months. But the real measure of success is in the response from new home customers.

That is the beauty of the SICBA BuiltGreen™  program. Modeled loosely after the National Association of Homebuilders Green Building Guidelines, the SICBA program is a voluntary program, run by your local Builders Association. The National Green Building Guidelines have been expanded upon, based on local, Pacific Northwest values and considerations. The result is a program that allows the customer to not only decide how “green” he wants his home, but how he wants to make it “green.” 

So what exactly is a BuiltGreen™ home? The SICBA BuiltGreen™ checklist contains several hundred action items, in six different categories. The categories include such subjects as Site and Water, Heating and Cooling, Health and Indoor Air Quality, and Materials Efficiency. To qualify as BuiltGreen™, each home must accumulate a certain number of points in each category, and must have a high enough over-all point total. It is up to the builder and his customer to decide how many points to go for, and exactly how to get them. For example, most homes built in Washington State today could easily qualify as a one-star BuiltGreen™ home, if just a little bit of thought were put into the process from the beginning. A recycling program must be in effect on the jobsite, and must be posted so that workers and sub-contractors are aware of the requirements. Some improvements must be made to the building envelop, and measures must be taken to assure that no groundwater pollutants leave the site untreated. 

Most builders and homeowners find that once they start the process, it is very easy to find more and more ways to improve upon both the process and the product. Jon Roberts, of Cascade Custom Homes and Design, has been amazed at the response of his customers. “They just can’t get enough of  BuiltGreen™”! Jon says. “When I show them the BuiltGreen™ checklist, they keep wanting to do even more!” Scott Yonkman, of Yonkman Homes agrees. “The timing of this seems to be prefect. Our customers are very ready for this. It is very important for us to be on the leading edge of BuiltGreen™.”

There is no one “right way” to go green. If global warming is what concerns you most, you can earn your BuiltGreen™ rating by selecting action items from the list that avoid use of fossil fuels, and avoid cutting down the rainforests. If high fuel costs and preserving our valuable and limited petroleum assets are your greatest concern, then selecting those items that increase over-all energy efficiency might be your choice. If preserving a more natural environment, with thriving wildlife habitat is most important to you, then you would opt to use more natural landscaping in your yard, preserving more of the natural underbrush and soils, and limiting your building footprint. 

The benefits of building green are many. To start with, the energy and maintenance costs of a BuiltGreen™ home are considerably reduced. A BuiltGreen™ home is healthy to live in, due to the reduced use of potentially harmful products. And over the life of the home, the long-term effects on the environment will be huge.

 What better legacy could you leave for your children and grandchildren than better health, cleaner air and water, and more money left over after paying the energy bill to enjoy it all with. It is pretty hard to argue against BuiltGreen™!

 “There are so many useful new technologies out there today, there is really no reason for our company to build anything less than a three-star BuiltGreen™ home,” says John Piazza of Piazza Construction, Inc. “Three-star should really become everybody’s standard”. The evidence so far is that the home-buying public in Skagit and Island Counties agree.