I received many calls and spent many long hours giving customers informal and formal cost analysis of what it would be to do their home projects with green products vs non green and while the differences were slight they often simply elected to go non green.

There is a small market percentage of people who are interested and are doing green remodels and those who specialize have a strong hold on that business but they are also well established companies with big overheads and staff that can assist them in going green. But in turn those costs are also passed on to the customer furthering “green” out of reach for the average home improvement project. And the small contractor/remodeler who is interested in adding green as part of their services are shut out because they don’t have the “experience” or the ability to access (time usually) to acquire said “experience”. It is very much a Catch-22 when it comes to going green. There is a great deal of interest, a limited number of people who are trained and those who would like to be but are not able to find the resources to assist in building that knowledge.

And hence its why I changed my company… I could do the work and sacrifice my own ethics or actually help educate and train some of my colleagues on what it means to be green by finding affordable and accessible products/ideas/etc so that going green is not just the option but the norm for the future.

I believe this is especially true in the under $10 million market where scale puts more pressure on project economics.

People believe green building costs significantly more - which is generally not true in western Washington where regulatory minimums require green practices anyway, and there is an abundance of locally manufactured green products are available.

The cost difference if any is even less when life cycle operating costs are considered.

We also believe that many people think green buildings look like “contraptions” or science fair projects with green roofs and fringe technology that looks odd and may or may not work.

These misperceptions are most prominent among small investors who account for small, but numerous projects which collectively amount to most of the built environment.

It is important to communicate to the small commercial investor & owner-occupier that green buildings are cost effective and can fit in with their surroundings and “look normal.”

Yes, the cost of the build out was more than traditional building, but, the benefits are truly enormous. When it comes spending money, I’m not the kind of person to just spend, spend, spend. I shop around get multiple quotes and compare them closely. One area that I know was more costly was the demolition of the existing space which needed to be deconstructed and removed from the building. When I bid this out, it ended up costing me about $1,000 more to have it removed and taken to a recycling plant. At the recycling plant, they sort out the debris and weight the materials. Then they provide you a report that tells you how much of the materials can be recycled and how much will end up in the landfill. In our project, we ended up recycling 97.7% of the materials. Less than 3% ended up in a landfill. That is a ridiculously large percentage and under normal non-green methods of disposal that would have gone into a landfill.

There’s other things that I ended up doing such as coming up with an electrical plan which reduced energy consumption by at least 30% which even was awarded an energy conservation grant of $13,000. That’s a big deal. I’m looking at reducing my annual electrical bill by about $16,000 each year.

So, yes, going green cost me more money, about 4% more than traditional methods but you have to look at how much money you’re going to save year-after-year. If you’re looking only at what you’re spending today then you’re not seeing the big picture of building green. The benefits are big monetarily and as well as other reasons which I haven’t even brought up — like from a health and environment perspective.