Federal Policies and Programs

Federal Laws that Support Green Building Include:
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 1969; Clean Air Act 1970,amended 1990; Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), 1976, amended 1994; and Energy Policy Act, 1992.

Executive Order 13101: Greening the Government through Waste Prevention, Recycling, and Federal Acquisition in response to RCRA 6002 (e) requires EPA to (1) designate items that are or can be made with recovered materials and (2) prepare guidelines to assist procuring agencies in complying with affirmative procurement requirements. Federal agencies (and state or local agencies using federal funds) are required to purchase those items.

Executive Order 13123: Greening the Government through Efficient Energy Management encourages government agencies to promote energy efficiency, water conservation, and the use of renewable energy products by mandating the reduction of federal facility energy consumption per gross square foot by 35 percent by 2010 compared to the 1985 base year. EO 13123 also mandates federal agencies obtain 2.5 percent of electricity equivalent through purchasing renewable power and installing renewable technologies. Recommended energy management strategies include sustainable building design.

Executive Order 13134: Developing and Promoting Biobased Products and Bioenergy aims to triple the national use of bioenergy and biotechnology by the year 2010. It is anticipated that meeting this objective will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100 million tons.  Through the coordination of federal efforts, technology will be developed that converts trees, plants, and other organic material into energy, while petroleum-based products will be increasingly replaced.

Executive Order 13148: Greening the Government through Leadership in Environmental Management makes the head of each federal agency responsible for ensuring that actions are taken to integrate environmental accountability into agency day-to-day decision making and long-term planning processes. Goals include Environmental Management, Environmental Compliance, Right-to-Know, Pollution
Prevention, Toxic Chemicals Release Reduction, Toxic Chemicals and Hazardous Substances Use Reduction, Reductions in Ozone-Depleting Substances, and Environmentally and Economically Beneficial Landscaping.

Build America is a DOE partnership that provides energy solutions for production housing. The program aims to produce homes on a community scale that use 30 to 50 percent less energy, implement innovative energy and material saving technologies, and help home builders reduce construction time and waste by as much as 50 percent.

EPA’s ENERGY STAR is a government/industry partnership that offers businesses and consumers energy-efficient solutions. Introduced in 1992 as a voluntary labeling program to identify and promote energy-efficient products, ENERGY STAR works with more than 7,000 public and private sector organizations to improve the energy performance of homes, businesses, appliances, office equipment, lighting, consumer electronics, and residential heating and cooling equipment. Organizations have committed to improve the energy performance of approximately
12 percent of U.S. commercial building space through ENERGY STAR.

DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) works to reduce the cost and environmental impact of the federal government by advancing energy efficiency and water conservation, promoting the use of distributed and renewable energy, and improving utility management decisions at federal sites. FEMP provides analytical software tools that perform complex energy consumption analyses and modeling, as well as comparative life-cycle costing analyses. For example, the Building Life-Cycle Cost Program provides computational support for the analysis of capital investments in buildings.

U.S. Department of Education’s Healthy and High-Performance Schools program, enacted by Congress in 2001 and advised by EPA and DOE, helps states develop information and grant incentives for green design and engineering of school renovations. (The program has not yet
been funded.)

Partnership for Advanced Technology in Housing (PATH) is a national effort launched in 1994 to improve the quality, durability, environmental impact, energy efficiency, and affordability, and decrease the disaster risk of America’s homes.

Rebuild America focuses on accelerating energy-efficiency improvements in existing commercial, institutional, and multifamily residential buildings through private-public partnerships created at the community level. Today this DOE program helps communities across the country sort though an often over whelming array of options for building improvements and develop and implement an action plan.

DOE’s Zero Energy Home is part of a national initiative funded by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The Zero Energy Home initiative aims to launch the concept into the mainstream home building industry, especially into the single-family home.