Evaluation Criteria for Green Materials

Due to increased environmental concern all over the world, practice of sustainable buildings or Green Buildings is being encouraged. The practice of green building can lead to benefits including reduced operating costs by increasing productivity, using less energy and water, improved public and occupant health due to improved indoor air quality, and reduced environmental impacts. Besides various other requirements, one of the essential requirements of the green building is to use enivrionment–friendly building materials – Green Materials. At present, there seems to be lot of confusion in defining green materials and manufaturers will have claims qualifying their products as green materials. There is a need to have evaluation criteria for qualifying materials as green materials. An attempt has been made in this paper to propose a scale for evaluation of building materials considering various factors that are essential for sustainable development, based on which classification of materials can be made in to different categories of green materials.