Towards a definition of zero impact buildings

There have been several attempts to define zero impact or near zero impact buildings. Most of these are based on measuring performance or on metric benchmarks regarding the quantity or quality of the various resources employed during a building’s life cycle. However, the problem underlying these efforts is that the resources are measured independent of each other, leading to restrictive overall design approaches. Most existing definitions focus on breaking even with a single resource, such as energy, water or materials, during the building’s life cycle. In fact, the building community needs to set a collective definition for what constitutes a zero ecological impact building, conflating all the resources involved. In this paper, we discuss this deficiency and suggest a shift in thinking necessary to define zero impact buildings. The resulting definition allows us to examine broader criteria including land management, carbon neutrality, energy neutrality, water efficiency and material neutrality. This paper reviews existing definitions or perspectives on zero impact buildings in order to redefine a more comprehensive definition of zero impact.