How your construction company can go green.
Concern for the environment is something that almost every industry needs to be concerned about. While green construction used to be a specialty service, push from the general public is causing more and more firms to adopt sustainable construction practices. Ready to make the transition? Your Bay Area contractor offers some tips to help your construction company go green.
Go Paperless
Cutting down on the amount of paper waste that your company produces is one of the best ways to start adopting more environmentally-friendly practices. While this may not seem like a very meaningful step, stop for a moment and think about all the stacks and stacks of blueprints that your company prints every year. When you imagine all of that going into a landfill, it’s easy to see why eliminating paper waste makes such a difference. Keep in mind that, even if you recycle all the paper that your company uses, the process of repurposing paper still requires the use of damaging chemicals and gallons upon gallons of freshwater. By making your operation fully digital, you can eliminate your company’s paper waste, while also improving efficiency and reducing operating costs.
Follow “Lean Construction” Principles
Lean construction refers to construction methods that maximize efficiency while reducing waste. While this sounds like a simple enough, for lean construction projects to be successful, you need to carefully review every step of the construction process and find ways to eliminate unnecessary waste. While this does require painstaking work at first, the environmental benefits are proven. Experts explain that lean construction has lessened the environmental impact of construction projects by reducing material waste by approximately 64%.
Adopt Green Building Materials and Processes
For your business to transition fully into greener practices, you need to start using environmentally-friendly building materials and utilizing green building processes. While this switch is not something that you can make overnight, it’s an important goal to work towards. By constantly thinking of ways to reduce your environmental impact, you can ensure that your company continues to take steps towards a greener future. To help you achieve this goal, some of the areas you should focus on include the following:
- New green building materials such as bioconcrete and laminated lumber
- Passive heating and cooling
- Toxic material reduction
- Rainwater collection
- Energy-efficient lighting
- Green roofs
- And so on
These are some of the steps that you can take to transition to greener construction practices. Are you looking to work with a contractor who cares about the environment? Then contact your Bay Area contractor at Proforma Construction. Serving Pleasanton and the surrounding California area, our highly-trained team is ready to make your commercial construction dreams a reality.