رسائل ماجيستير
English
2011
Developing a green building rating system for Egypt
Salah El Haggar, Vivian Adel Younan
كلية العلوم والهندسة-الجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة · مصر
Buildings have a large impact on the environment; Water pollution, Energy consumption, Waste generation and CO2 emission are some of the negative effects that a building can have on the environment. The act of reducing the negative effects of a building on environment is called â Going Greenâ . Leaving the environment for future generations' use -or in other words have no impact on the environment- means â being Sustainableâ The success in this process depends on many criteria; and the only way to insure its success is to have a way to assess them.There are many tools for environmental assessment; from them is rating systems. There are many available rating systems on the market, yet from the comparative analysis performed in this thesis, one can notice that each rating system is accommodated to suite the environment for which it was designed for. For example, LEED is mainly concerned with energy use and gives lower importance to water while BREEAM Gulf does exactly the opposite thing. This is why a new special rating system that suites and matches the needs of the construction industry and environment in Egypt was needed to be developed.To do that, s survey of the methodologies used to develop green building rating systems in several countries â Greece, Lebanon and Jordan- were explored in order to use their methodologies as a guide. From that it was concluded that first, a comprehensive list of categories and their sub categories that affect green buildings needed to be developed. In order to develop it, a comparative analysis was done for four rating systems-GREEN GLOBES, LEED V3 NC, BREEAM Gulf and ESTIDAMA. They were chosen to be two regional rating systems and two international rating systems. From that comparison, both the weights of the categories weights for the four rating systems compared as well as the comprehensive list of sub categories was developed. From that list, a questionnaire was formed, Then from the weights calculated using an analytic hierarchy process, the resulting weights were further compared with the original four rating system for refining.The participants gave the highest weight to water and energy use with a slightly higher weight to water use of 20% and 19% to energy use. Also, when the resulting weights were compared to the weights given by the rating systems compared, Pollution got a relatively high weight of 16% with another unexpected result of the relatively low weight for renewable energy sources of 15%. The remaining five main categories materials, indoor environmental quality, livable outdoors and transportation, site ecology and other sustainable systems and processes got nearly equal weights ranging from 8 to 10%. The participants were familiar with green buildings and LEED. They were also from different fields, companies and areas of interest. Their answers were consistent, as shows in the AHP consistency index. So the resulting weights are reliable.The main outcomes of this thesis are a list of main categories and sub categories with the weights for the main categories, the energy use sub categories and water use sub categories.
