Auxinews

I recently attended the National Lumber & Building Materials Dealers Association (NLBMDA) and National Building Materials Distributors Association (NBMDA) Legislative Conference and Green Building Forum in Washington, DC, and wow that’s a mouthful. The focus of this first-ever joint conference and legislative event was to allow members to learn about green building and find common ground to approach their respective members of congress. Appropriately the green building forum was held on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, and was led by Peter Yost of BuildingGreen, LLC. Peter introduced the attendees to a new tool called the GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, which was developed through a partnership between Fine Homebuilding and Environmental Building News, bringing the collective expertise of those publications into one resource which is described as, “an online suite of expert advice, proven construction details, and real-world tools to help residential architects, builders, remodelers, and others successfully to build and remodel high-quality homes, the green way.” Peter is a firm believer that green building needs to equal quality, and he envisions that as the industry matures, quality will be further integrated with green design and construction practices.

The next session included a panel of representatives from United States Green Building Council (USGBC), National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), and the Green Building Initiative. They were given an opportunity to introduce their respective programs to the audience and provide us with new developments. Noteworthy developments include LEED v3 (a new version of the standard), NAHB Research Center ‘Green Approved’ product seal, and ANSI approved Green Globes process. The NAHB Research Center’s “Green-Approved” product seal is being offered to manufacturers as a method to easily and effectively communicate that their products merit certain credits within the NAHB Standards and are available for specific points. All of these organizations were started at different times, by different sets of stakeholders, with different visions of the future, and different definitions of what a green building program should reward. The competitiveness of these organizations may be confusing at first glance but it’s that competitiveness that drives improvements within their programs and which leads to a greener built environment.

The final presenters provided the perspectives of how the green building industry is shaping new business opportunities for a distributor and a dealer, Bluelinx and Fairfax Lumber & Hardware respectively. Both speakers were upbeat about the business opportunities and they admitted that there is a learning curve to becoming familiar with the new industry and business but they were confident that this leadership role has given their companies a competitive advantage. The learning curve is not simply internally focused on their own companies however both expressed a serious need for them to provide their customers with information about the green credentials of a product and how that might fit into a green building program’s scoring system.

As the conference wound down it was quite obvious that three themes had risen to the top. Green building and green building products need to equal quality; there are competing green building programs in the industry providing the end-users with different benefits; and the companies that are succeeding in this market are leaders who are taking the time to educate themselves and their customers about the interaction between their green products and the customer’s green project. Quality, competitiveness, and leadership – those are characteristics that will redefine the North American home building supply and construction business in this new era.