I’m going to go out on a limb here and complain about what NARI and NAHB are doing with their green professional designations. Hopefully I won’t make too many enemies, but I think this deserves some serious discussion. NAHB has a 2 day green building course which leads to obtaining the CGP (Certified Green Professional) designation. NARI has a 12 week long web seminar (once a week), that leads to their GCP (Green Certified Professional) designation. Talk about confusing, just shoot me now. I was involved, at varying levels, with both the training and the criteria for the designations, and, not uncharacteristically, I was the fly in the ointment in many discussions about how to make them more, rather than less, rigorous. I attempted to require extensive experience and a history of having completed projects that were certified by a third party in order to obtain these designations, but those requirements were not included.
I have been concerned for a long time that there are too many people out there calling themselves green builders and remodelers who are not really doing truly “green” projects. It concerns me even more that, now that these designations are becoming more common, that consumers will see them as “certification” that the work that these professionals do will be green. It may or may not, but in any case, the average consumer will not have any way of knowing unless they are extremely well educated in the subject. Don’t get me wrong, I am very excited that the training is available, and lots of professionals are taking advantage of it to expand their knowledge. I am just very wary of expanded “greenwashing” that we will likely be seeing as the suddenly trendy green movement explodes in the market. Green building is not always easy, and it is very possible that a professional with a designation will not have all the experience they need to make the right set of decisions, creating more problems than had they not even tried to build green.
Stay tuned for more on this subject….
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2 comments:
This is probably a cop-out but I've resisted getting designations because I inherently distrust those phony sounding titles as a cheap mail order course from my "Boys Life" days. On the other hand, give the public some credit. If I'm going to hand $500k over to a builder who is a "green" builder, I'd like to know what "green" project they've done in the past. I think most people are skeptical of those letters behind names on business cards. Except "MD" of course, my wife is an Internist so I respect those letters! -Matt Risinger
We try to use get a green certification for every project that we work on. All of the certifications that we offer are 3rd party verified giving the end user more comfort in the quality of the work. We also disclose the worksheet to the homeowner and show them other areas where they can still make improvements. If you are not going to get it certified, the only other thing that you can do is get a HERS rating which is universally accepted to show how the house performs. Carl (the owner of this blog) can do HERS rating as well.
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