Study Confirms Environmental Benefits of Adaptive Reuse

As Laskow reports, one item of interest to come out of the report is that renovated buildings outperformed new buildings on energy savings in every category of building type except for one: "converting a warehouse to a multi-family dwelling, which required enough extra materials that creating a new building was the greener choice."

"One goal of the report was to make the case for building reuse as smart development practice, an option that is often overlooked. For green-minded preservationists, the data in the report gives heft to long-held beliefs: As TreeHugger's Lloyd Alter puts it, 'As a writer about sustainable design [the report] backs up the arguments I have been making for years, and as a preservation activist, it gives me and everyone in the movement the ammunition we need to demonstrate that old buildings are green.'"