Will the vogue for ‘green’ buildings and building products be able to survive the current economic downturn? The logic for saying ‘no’ goes like this. Finances are more pinched; people become more interested in simple cost equations; and the motivation to look at more environmentally friendly options dissipates. Whatever the cost implication (good, bad or indifferent), issues like this are seen to just fade in the public perception among a tsunami of other worries.

But this is all rather simplistic. I do admit that with food prices the way they are, I have stopped looking at ‘free-range, corn-fed’ chickens that are guaranteed to have pecked up thirty tons of ‘genuine’ farmyard grit. But then, that’s me and my general scepticism toward the ‘organics’ industry. In general, I would reject the idea that we are motivated by nothing other than a short-term inbuilt balance sheet of personal finance. (In any case, running a ‘green’ building could well be the more economic option in the long term.) People are not going to stop demanding more environmentally friendly products just like that.

To understand this motivation, let’s take a look at a developing country: India. Now often, developing nations do not get a good press. Countries such as China are seen to have sacrificed any environmental awareness to more hard-wired economic instincts. Certainly, when I spent a lot of time in the big cities and holiday resorts of Thailand in a former life, scenes of immense beauty inevitably existed uncomfortably alongside fairly horrid and energy-inefficent buildings.

But in India, ‘green’ buildings have begun to catch on and the Times of India reports that there are 315 such buildings in India: a modest figure but maybe higher than one would have expected with all the ‘developing world’ stereotypes (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Earth/Ggreen_buildings_in_India/articleshow/3512037.cms). The report also draws attention to a big demand for ‘green’ building materials in India (suppliers take note).

One suspects that despite all the current financial hoopla (which might well lead an alien visitor to think that the world is about to end), lots of ideas and pursuits that one might think people would forget about will carry on because people simply like them and the ideas behind them.

Lyndon White, Managing Editor
This comment was originally published in the Buildingtalk Newsletter