Green building concept to facilitating high quality indoor environment for building occupants in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Well-being is an important aspect determining the quality of life of an occupant. Hence, it is essential to have a good indoor environmental quality, as it affects the productivity and health of such occupants. Further, indoor air quality, acoustic, day-lighting and thermal comfort contribute to better indoor environment quality, and have a positive effect on an occupant's productivity and performance. Accordingly, many studies believed that the green building design will become more common practice once the human benefits are identified, primarily the productivity gains believed to be associated with the provision of high quality indoor environments. Hence, buildings are increasingly designed or required to be ‘green’ in recent years, giving the quality of the indoor environment new importance. Therefore, several green building assessment tools have been applied worldwide namely, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM), Comprehensive Assessment System for Building Environmental Efficiency (CASBEE) and Green Star etc in facilitating high quality indoor environment. Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) has considered as a major criteria in such tools. Thus, various IEQ factors relate to temperature and humidity, acoustic, ventilation, indoor air quality, day lighting and lighting quality, thermal comfort and access to views have been considered in these techniques. Similarly in Sri Lanka, GREENSL® Rating System is applied for buildings in local context so as to obtain green certification. Even though, it emerges IEQ as an important aspect, it is considerably less compared to other domains. Thus, four green assessment tools were suggested which can be applied for buildings in Sri Lankan context through the review of key research papers. Accordingly, such green building tools can be considered for Sri Lankan buildings as a new concept/tool or even the existing system can be further enhanced so as to provide a better quality indoor environment for building occupants.