Environmental Benefits

Protecting the environment is important to ensure we maintain a world that is compatible with the ways you and future generations wish to live—a world with plenty of clean air, clean water, clean energy, biodiversity, and the other resources we need.

Building sustainable homes and renovating existing ones to be more energy efficient is one way to help mitigate the impact of climate change.

Living in a Truly Green Home is NOT about “Saving the Planet”—It’s about Saving Ourselves

Our planet will be fine no matter what we do to the environment. But if we don’t take better care of where we live, our planet will not be a pleasant, easy, or friendly place to live. Unfortunately, as of yet, not enough is being done or done fast enough to prevent things from getting worse. Previous projections have underestimated the pace of the damage being done.

Here are 10 of the many environmental problems that are still getting worse:

1. The eastern part of the country is experiencing hotter summers, winters with more large snow storms, and more frequent, bigger, and more violent storms and hurricanes.
2. Across the US and worldwide, there are more and worse storms and floods. 500-year and 1,000-year storms and floods happen regularly now.
3. At the same time, many places around the world, like in the western half of our country, are experiencing the worst droughts in centuries. More and more areas have water shortages so severe they require water use restrictions.
4. Record-breaking high and sometimes deadly high temperatures are happening more frequently and for longer periods of time during the summer, spring, and fall.
5. Many parts of the US are experiencing more and larger wildfires that destroy homes and wildlife, driving up insurance rates as well as public costs to fight them.
6. Because of rising sea levels, we have parts of Florida, for example, experiencing regular tidal flooding that they didn’t in the past. And, during Hurricane Sandy, parts of New York City were flooded for the first time.
7. Rising sea levels are already causing the loss of areas people live in. Because of storms and rising sea levels, one of the smaller Hawaiian islands is now totally submerged. 
8. Within the lifetimes of you or your children and their children, billions if not trillions of dollars of land and property will be lost to rising sea levels and spent on efforts to protect areas like lower Manhattan and parts of Long Island from regular flooding.
9. In some parts of the US and around the world we already have climate migrants—people leaving their homes, places of work, and farms because climate change has made the areas they live in no longer viable places to live.
10. We are losing plant and animal species at an extremely high rate. Thousands of species have gone extinct during our lifetime. Besides the ripple effect caused by any species going extinct, scientific and especially medical research relies on biodiversity for major breakthroughs.

Building a Green Home Is an Important Part of Being Part of the Solution

The design, construction, energy use, materials, and systems of BPC homes help protect the environment and make the home and homeowner’s life more sustainable. Here are just 10 of the ways BPC Green Homes help make the environment better:

1. They reduce, and in some cases even eliminate, the use of non-renewable (fossil fuel) and climate-changing types of energy 
2. They make use of renewable and plentiful clean energy sources
3. They reduce your “carbon footprint” to help slow climate change
4. They reduce air and water pollution
5. They help maintain clean water resources
6. They reduce the use of slow-growing and/or endangered natural resources
7. They help protect biodiversity (plant and animal)
8. They generate less waste
9. They help make the environment less toxic
10. They use more local building materials, which reduces pollution and the use of carbon-based fuels caused by unnecessary transportation

The homes BPC builds today use carbon smart materials as much as possible. These materials include insulation manufactured from sustainably grown wood fiber or straw, which act as carbon sinks, absorbing atmospheric carbon as they grow. Once installed, the carbon in these products is locked into the structure for the life span of the house. BPC avoids, as much as possible, building materials with high levels of embodied, or up-front, carbon, which is released into the atmosphere during the sourcing, transportation, and manufacturing of the materials. The point is to avoid contributing to the ongoing climate change crisis. Using “carbon smart” materials, we can build homes that become part of the climate change solution, rather than further contributing to the problem.

Green Homes Are Becoming More and More Affordable, Making Them More Accessible

Because of increasing demand and economies of scale, as more homes are built using green building approaches, materials, systems, and technology, the costs of these building products go down. Increased use of these products encourages new and improved technology to be developed. In turn, this also lowers costs and improves performance.

For example: The cost of building and installing solar photovoltaic panels has dropped by about 90% in recent years. At the same time, because of improving technology, new solar panels convert sunlight to electrical power significantly more efficiently. This reduces the number of solar panels needed for a given home, which lowers the cost of installation and further lowers the cost of energy.

Solar panel efficiency is now so high that even in places like cloudy northern Europe, solar power is growing in leaps and bounds. The cost per kilowatt of electrical power from solar energy technology is now competitive with or better than from fossil fuels. And that is not even considering the hidden costs of fossil fuels, like pollution, health problems, environmental damage, climate change, etc. 

Home storage battery technology has also improved greatly. This means the excess clean energy your solar panels generate during the day can be stored and used at night or on cloudy days. Not long from now, whole-house battery storage may become widely used.

Raising the Bar and Creating Demand

Homes that are not built green and energy efficient are growing less and less attractive to homeowners and home buyers. This is not only because green homes are less expensive to operate. Younger generations are increasingly aware of environmental concerns and want to live in a home that is not just comfortable and healthy, but also lives up to their values.

At BPC Green Builders, we take pride in the environmental mission aspect of our work. Talk to our team today about living in a green home that’s making the world better for you, your children, and your grandchildren.