A Study on the Eco-friendliness of LEED Green Building from the viewpoint of Health Promotion

Abstract

(Background and Purpose) Green building contributes to health promotion through eco - friendly characteristics and is positioned as the most efficient and nature - friendly building. These natural-friendly factors include saving or recycling resources, energy and water resources. Thereby resources are efficiently used to reduce the cost of resource and energy use and minimize pollutant emissions. These green buildings ultimately promote health and comfort. Moreover, their unique features are shown from the internal and external components and finishing materials. The study will analyze how LEED green buildings are related to energy efficiency, recyclability, ecology, pro-sociality and health promotion. The purpose of this study is to find out whether LEED green building is suitable to be developed for our future generations who we predict to be living in the highly polluted Earth. (Method) This study is about analyzing the cases of LEED Green Buildings; POSCO Power Future Building, Samsung Global Engineering Building, Grand Seoul, SK Networks New Daechi Building, Seoul Finance Center and SK Chemical Center building, which are certified a ‘platinum’ and ‘gold’ rating by official pro-environmental organizations. For this analysis, the field survey was conducted from July 2015 to July 2016 to find out how these buildings are related to energy efficiency, ecology, recyclability, pro-sociality and health promotion. The case analyses are made based on the field visits and experts opinions following the analysis frame. The buildings are evaluated and graded into three levels; low ◯, normal ◐, and high ●, for each of the five assessment criteria. This study is based on analyzing the LEED green buildings which have acquired the ‘LEED Platinum’ or ‘LEED Gold’ certificate. The rationale for the such research range is because‘LEED’ is becoming one of the representative international environment-friendly certificates and increasing number of examples of overseas certification. (Results) Even though the analyzed buildings in this study are officially approved as the excellent eco-friendly buildings, certified with international certifications like LEED Platinum or Gold , some of them still have room for improvement in terms of health promotion and pro-sociality. LEED green buildings will be further highlighted as an important factor in the world facing aging population as with regard to future sociality, the convenience of the elderly population and the disabled is undermined, and the importance of contribution to the local community will be emphasized. (Conclusions) Installation of physical training equipments of good condition and improvement of indoor air quality should not be the final destination of this run. These operations should be leading to higher productivity level of the workers in the building.