The Green Building Council also estimates that an upfront investment of 2 percent in green-design elements will net, over 20 years, a 20 percent return on total costs. That means if $20,000 is spent on green elements for a $1 million project, owners will see a return of $200,000 over 20 years.

“It makes economic sense,” Holowka says “These buildings are saving energy, therefore the utility bills are lower. The people inside the buildings are healthier and more productive. People costs are really the highest costs—so if you can save more money on people costs, with less absenteeism, less turnover, why wouldn’t you?”

Employee-related savings are a little-heralded benefit of green building, but the Green Building Council has been gathering more data and focusing more and more on this side effect.

Green interior elements—natural lighting, good ventilation, no paint or carpets that off-gas toxins—leads to increased performance and retention of workers, the council claims. Various studies support people-related reasons for adopting green building elements, particularly indoors. Findings in that regard include:

• Employees at green-certified buildings are 2 to 16 percent more productive.
• Students who took tests in natural light finished 20 to 26 percent faster than peers who took tests under electric lights, according to a study conducted for the California Board for Energy Efficiency.
• A study of 108 stores in a retail chain showed sales were 40 percent higher at day lit stores than those lighted by fluorescent or other electric lighting, according to a study by the Heschong Mahone Group.

Savannah’s Abercorn Common is a 180,000-square-foot development that’s still in progress. It is being developed by Melaver Inc., a family-owned construction company. Why’d they go green?

“That really stemmed back many years to the Melaver family’s beliefs and way of living personally,” says project manager Randy Peacock, noting that the family’s matriarch once forbid the removal of old-growth oaks in a shopping mall parking lot, back in the 1970s when the modus operandi for construction was to bulldoze and pave.

“It was just the right thing to do,” Peacock says of the trees. “We’d been doing things green for years for other properties, and when we first learned about the U.S. Green Building Council, it worked to our advantage to implement the certification.”