by Brianna Crandall — April 11, 2014—The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) , building technology society ASHRAE , and the International Code Council (ICC), developers of the ICC Family of Codes for the built environment, recently announced that they have agreed to jointly develop the 2015 edition of the ICC/ASHRAE 700 National Green Building Standard.
This is the third edition of the standard and the first time that ASHRAE has partnered on its development. NAHB and ICC commented that the technical support and standards expertise of the global engineering society will help position the National Green Building Standard even further ahead as the leading consensus standard in the industry.
In 2007, NAHB and ICC convened a consensus committee of home builders, code officials, product manufacturers, building science and energy-efficiency specialists, and governmental representatives to develop the standard. It was approved in 2009 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as the first green standard for residential construction, development and remodeling. Since then, the National Green Building Standard has helped define and advance sustainable home building, remodeling and development—a sector expected to represent as much as a third of the market by 2016.
Now known as the ICC 700 National Green Building Standard (NGBS), it was updated in 2012 by a subsequent consensus committee and again approved by ANSI. NGBS has been used to certify more than 32,000 single-family and multifamily homes and residential developments for reaching its established benchmarks for energy, water and resource efficiency, indoor environmental quality, home owner education, and site development.
