A study of the effectiveness of green measures in industrial buildings

Abstract

Building sector is regarded as one of the key factors in determining people's quality of life (Wadu & Wan, 2013). To pursue better living conditions, the role of building management is no longer just focused on providing a hygienic and safety living or working place, but is also required to create a sustainable environment. Thus, building management has to adopt various green measures to improve the sustainability of their buildings.

In Hong Kong, industrial buildings being part of the building sector with high energy consumption and waste generation, which increased its potential to implement green measures. Therefore, nowadays management of industrial buildings are more willing to implement various kinds of green measures in their buildings. In order to affirm the effectiveness of those measures, this study will focus on evaluating the cost-effectiveness of green measures in Hong Kong's industrial buildings and will try to identify the cost-effective green measures that could be applied in industrial buildings.

In this research, it would study on energy efficiency measures related to lighting, air-conditioning and lifts installations, as well as waste recycling measures. A case study of a sample building would illustrate the effectiveness of green measures in real situation. The concept of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness will be used to analyze the performance of green measures. Furthermore, the concept of payback period will be adopted in determining the cost-effectiveness of a green measures. Also, an interview will be carried out to understand the difficulties of implementing green measures in industrial buildings.

The results of this study showed that waste recycle is the most cost-effective scheme in industrial buildings. Also, when comparing the cost-effectiveness of various energy efficiency measures, replacement of lighting is more cost-effective than the others, even though the type of lighting being replaced involved a higher cost. Apart from that, the energy saving system for lift installations has a highest energy saving performance when compared to those measures of lighting and air conditioning. Also, the findings showed that the factors of disturbance on operations, insufficient quantifiable benefits, high investment cost, long payback period and lack of support from senior management and government are the key barriers impeded the implementation of green measures in industrial buildings. Besides, incorporation of organization objectives with green measure performance and increase linkage of monetary benefits with the performance of green measure could help to improve the accomplishment of green measures. The findings of this study would serve the purpose to remind the building management of industrial buildings the environmental impacts that generated from their buildings and suggested means for them to contribute their efforts in environmental protection. By showing the performance and evaluating different kinds of green measures with a real case, this research had sorted out the cost-effective scheme and provided some actual statistics and information to building management of industrial buildings for their decision making.