Imagine living in a home where natural healthy sunlight enters each room through windows with wonderful outdoor views or through piping from the roof using fiber optic solar lighting. While you’re relaxing in your home, you breathe in fresh natural air all year round provided by a passive ventilation system. And as you walk through your home, you enter a beautiful sunroom area filled with natural plants that are watered by recycled rainwater and hear the bubbling sounds of a wonderful water feature nearby. Sounds too good to be true? Well it’s not, its sustainable home design.
So what is sustainable design in homes? Sustainable home design is the incorporation of conservation, improved indoor environments, water efficiency, waste reduction, site planning and energy reduction in houses to help us maintain our existence with the natural resources we have left.
The goal of sustainable home design is to reduce consumption of our nonrenewalable resources and to reduce environmental damage. Unfornuately, building and construction impacts energy, water and other resources while contributing to pollution and the destruction of our natural environments.. For example, almost half of forests originally on our earth are gone, plus over 50% of our U.S. wetlands are no longer preserved. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), at least 50,000 species become extinct per year, plus building materials and related manufacturing, construction and building operations consume approximately 16 percent of available fresh water annually. According to Worldwatch Institute about 40 percent of the world's total energy usage is dedicated to the construction and operation of buildings and the building industry consumes at least 3 billion tons of raw materials annually or about 40 percent of the total material flow in the global economy. North America, Europe and Japan use more than 25 percent of the world's annual of wood production according to Worldwatch Institute and the Natural Resource Defense Council predicted that the rainforests will be gone by the year 2050 if we continue consumption at this rate.. Also, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, waste from construction and demolition equals at least 1/4 of all waste in U.S. landfills.
So what can we do to help? If you’re building a home, site your home so that it maximizes heat in the winter and reduces heat in the summer. Use recycled materials in construction, when possible, such as old lumber, rubber, bamboo or refurbished carpet or ceramic tile for flooring, buy insulation make of wood pulp including newspapers and consider reclaimed roof shingles or environmentally friendly material. To reduce energy, buy compact fluorescent bulbs because they use 75% less electricity and last twice as long. Then install occupancy or motion sensors that turn lights off when not in use.
For the exterior of your new home, purchase mulch made from wooden pallets and clay pavers instead of cement to create a pervious surface that allows water drainage into the ground. For your outdoor areas, put in water efficient landscape such as a rain garden to reduce storm runoff, because according to the EPA, 70% pollution in streams and lakes is from storm water. In your home, come up with a waste management plan to recycle materials such as donating scraps of wood to charities, recycling paint or reusing packaging materials, plus remember to provide an area to separate and distribute recyclable materials.

Designer’s Eye column was written by Karen Mills of Interiors by Design, Inc. and host, Living Large.