For a long time the term ‘green’ has been associated with sustainable development in the built environment and in general.
There is, however, no consensus about what the term ‘Green Building’ covers. Some actors use it for buildings with green elements or facades (with vegetation), whilst others use it for buildings which focus on low energy consumption. This is an unavoidable fact one is faced with upon a study of the literature available about green buildings (e.g. Edwards 2003, Owen Lewis 1999, Steele 2005 and Wines 2000)

As a result of this the term ‘Green Building’ is used for anything to such an extend that the term ‘Greenwash’ was invented as a label for buildings and companies which claim to be sustainable through green association but really are not.
The big question today is; ‘How do we protect the term “sustainable” from suffering the same fate as the term “green”?’For starters, the term ‘sustainable’ relates to the definition of ‘sustainable development’ introduced in the Brundtland Report from 1987: (www.worldinbalance.net/agreements/1987-brundtland.php), which states that:

‘Sustainable development seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future’  (Brundtland et.al. 1987:51)

Based on the Brundtland Report consensus has been reached about three types of sustainable development; economic, social and environmental. This is also reflected in the ISO 15392 for sustainable construction.

These days a new type of sustainability is making an outbreak from ‘environmental sustainability’. This has happened as a result of the large focus on energy-efficiency and global warming during the past decades, and the name for the new type of sustainability is suitably ‘climatic sustainability’.

In other words; sustainability is now a foursome rather than a threesome which adds to the complexity of the understanding of sustainable buildings. It does, however, also make it easier to label low-energy buildings, which until now have been kind of a naughty child in comparison with true/idealistic sustainability, as ‘climatically sustainable’.A lot of effort has been made to develop ISO standards for sustainable construction (e.g. ISO/TS 21929-1 and ISO 15392), which attempt to define what sustainability should be in the built environment. So far, the standards only provide poor explanations of how to translate the aim set in the Brundtland Report into practice. There is, thus, still an ever present threat that the term sustainable can be misused for spin in the building sector.This means that it is up to us – the practitioners and builders – to take responsibility for how we apply the term to our projects. E.g. by: