Eco - HousingEco Housing Certification Program is the first ever unique initiative taken up jointly by Pune Municipal Corporation and Science and Technology Park, University of Pune to ensure environmentally sustainable construction in the urban over-populated sprawls of the state. This will have an astounding effect in arresting the adverse environmental impact of staggering commercial growth. What is Eco- Housing?Eco Housing is the practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings and their sites use and harvest energy, water, materials, and reduce building impacts on human health and the environment through better siting, design, sustainable construction practices, lowered use of natural resources, operation, maintenance, and removal — the complete building life cycle. Where & why is it useful?Buildings significantly alter the environment. Different activities like design, construction, extraction, production, maintenance, demolition, disposal of building materials have caused a tremendous impact on our environment and our natural resources over the last few decades. Environmental performance must be balanced against economic performance. So a dire need of identifying environmentally and economically balanced building products, and all the more designing an assessment system focusing on eco-building materials, has surfaced up, which needs to be attended to immediately. At the face of this grim situation Science and Technology Park has evolved Eco – housing Assessment Criteria jointly with International Institute for Energy Conservation, The Energy Resources Institute ,Rachna Sansad with inputs from several other stake holders and the programme was supported by United States-Asia Environmental Partnership & United States Agency for International Development. What is the process of this work we follow at Scitech Park?We take up a meeting with the client first in order to understand their project status and discuss about the eco – housing certification procedure and how we need to proceed further. We do also review the plans to see if they meet the existing Pune Municipal Corporation norms. The client then needs to give the registration form along with the certification fees to Scitech Park. We carry out the certification procedure in 4 phases i.e. Registration, Pre-construction, Construction and Post -construction. Every phase includes documentation and site visit & all the documents along with our evaluation report for each phase is submitted to Pune Municipal Corporation for their record. Scitech Park monitors and verifies compliance with eco- housing criteria throughout the project. We do handhold and provide suggestions as and when required by the developers. Who all are using it as of now, our clientele?
What are the future plans?We have already launched climate specific Eco – housing Criteria Version II which is applicable to all the climatic zones in India. Having introduced eco-housing concept in Pune and Mumbai, we now are preparing to take this initiative to other places in Maharashtra and all other states in India. Eco – housing criteria effectively addresses and provide exhaustive solutions for issues related to sustainable development and it will help reduce the load on municipal infrastructure including water supply, waste water treatment, solid waste management etc. The eco – housing assessment criteria has been developed for the first time in India for residential projects by Scitech Park.The assessment criteria focusses on resource conservation measures like site planning, total water management, energy conservation, eco – friendly and energy efficient building materials, renewable energy and solid waste management. There are total 88 criteria and 1000 points distributed across these 88 criteria. This program can be adapted to address local environment concerns effectively and has immense potential for replication in states across the country. Pune Municipal Corporation - First implementationPune Municipal Corporation is the first urban local body to adopt the eco – housing certification programme. This program has successfully addressed all the measures necessary to scale up and mainstream energy efficient and environment friendly housing.
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