The Commercial Modular Building Blog

How can modular construction help you achieve energy efficiency? Well there are several ways that modular buildings themselves do this in terms of the way in which they are designed and the various energy saving options that can be implemented after the building itself is built.

Modular buildings can help you save on your energy use with their superior insulation and other energy efficient options such as efficient lighting. When it comes to insulation, our modular walls feature an inner core that improves insulation properties, meaning modular buildings will stay warm with lower heating requirements when it is cold out and stay cool with lower air conditioning requirements when it is hot outside.

In terms of lighting, we optimize energy usage  with our selection of efficient lighting, such as T8 and T5 style lights. We can also go over your building plans and implement lighting calculations in order to situate an array of lights that will most effectively and efficiently light a workspace. We also offer lighting controls and energy savers such as motion sensor controls. These aren’t necessarily intrinsic to the modular building itself, but are useful additions for improving energy efficiency.

With more efficient lighting options, and a well insulated modular building that will keep down your heating and cooling costs, the combination of these improvements can help you lower your yearly energy bill and save on costs.  

Thanks to the energy-saving properties of modular buildings, and their reusability and recyclability, they are considered a green construction process. This sustainable construction practice is quickly becoming the model to follow in the 21^st century.

Why has the modular building industry been growing so rapidly recently? And why has the industry been talked about so much in business and construction journals? Is it because of new technologies, making the modular building process more advantageous? Is it because of concern about the environment? Or because of concerns about efficiency?

I want to argue that it is all of the above. Due to coinciding advances in technology and various global problems, modular building is poised to set the new standard in construction practices.

Early modular technology saw cheap, quickly put-together prefabricated buildings being put up in a deliberate sacrifice of quality for quantity. As modular technology has improved, efficiency of the building process has not only improved, but building quality has vastly improved as well, a quality that makes modular buildings comparable to buildings of hard construction.

As technologies improve, more architects are becoming interested in designing with modular frameworks, making modular buildings not only functionally desirable, but aesthetically as well, attracting new portions of the market.

These changing trends in technology and design in the industry have coincided with not only economic panic, but environmental panic as well.

In a weak economy, businesses worldwide are looking to cut costs, improve efficiency, and adopt leaner practices in general. Modular buildings naturally account for this, as they save on material, labor, and energy costs. Not only that, but modular buildings are highly flexible and adaptable, and go hand in hand with leaner business strategy.

On top of all this, concern with our impact of the environment has reached a global high. With modular buildings’ recyclability and eco-friendly materials and design-aspects, modular construction can account for more sustainable building practices as well.

It is a converging of all of these seperate forces that is propelling the modular construction industry into a new worldwide standard. We can use technology and ingenious design techniques to solve many difficult societal and environmental problems. Certainly a beautiful thing.

So I talked a bit about green buildings in the last post, how our modular buildings are made from recyclable materials and are reusable for a variety of applications.

But what does it mean to be a green building? Besides being recyclable and reusable? And what is all this talk about sustainability that has been going on? I seek to address those issues in this post.

A green building is not only made of recyclable materials, which is always a great feature, but is designed and built with many other aspects of environmental interaction in mind. Everything from water use, energy use, ventilation, to insulation and heating/cooling efficiency is considered when building a green building.

A modular building is made from recyclable materials and is reusable, yes, but there is more to the green benefits of modular construction. Modular walls have a higher insulating capability than drywall, so less energy will be used to heat and cool the building. Used with water-saving faucets and toilets, a modular building goes a long way in ensuring the building is environmentally friendly.

But where do we get the motivation to build green buildings in the first place? They’re a nice idea sure, but are they really necessary? Hopefully we want to answer, “Well of course they are!” But why? This is where the concept of sustainability comes in.

Sustainability pertains to the belief that we have limited resources to work with, but we didn’t always believe this.

Plants and trees grow, animals reproduce, rain replenishes our water supplies…all of these observable phenomena gave earlier generations the illusion that we have infinite resources to work with. Our planet’s natural life cycles replenish all of the resources we need. Nothing is created or destroyed…waste only breaks down to be recycled and used again, etc.

The problem is that this way of thinking is no longer relevant to what reality tells us. What we have learned with modern sciences and technology is that we are quickly depleting our resources.

Have you heard of the term “renewable?” Renewable resources are resources that replenish, so yes, we can draw from stores of renewable resources. The only problem is that these renewable resources require certain environmental conditions to replenish themselves. What we have been doing is using resources to the point of them no longer being renewable at their source. If you put enough of a strain on a self-replenishing system, that system will no longer have the ability to replenish itself. To cite an extreme example, you can cut your finger and your skin will heal and regenerate. Your body has that capacity. But if your hand or even your finger comes off, your body doesn’t have the capabilities of regenerating that hand or finger. That’s just not how it works. The same is the case with certain resources. If you draw water from a reservoir to the point of the reservoir drying up, that reservoir may lose the ability to retain water in the future.

Sustainability is a concept applied to our understanding of resources. When we say we want to develop a sustainable resource or design, then we want that resource or design to be fit for human use, but also to exist without damaging our ecosystem. Having a sustainable resource means we are using that resource moderately, but also allowing the resource to replenish, putting less of a strain on the ecosystem. By the same token, if we are working with a sustainable design, then that design, whether it is a car or building or appliance will be able to exist in our environment without putting a strain on resources.

Sustainable design in buildings pertains to a philosophy of design that incorporates considerations of the relation between the economic, ecological, and social spheres and the need for sustainable resources for consumption.

What this all means is this: we have come to understand that humans as a species exist within a delicate ecological system, or the environment. Our concept of the environment is no longer that of a simple background full of resources that we can fool around in all day. We have come to understand the environment as a complicated process that we are inexorably a part of. Everything we do affects the environment, which in turn can affect our society back, which can cause all sorts of economical changes as well. It is in this way that society, the ecosystem, and the economy are all connected. If we damage one portion of that relationship, the damage will eventually transfer to the other portions. It is this current understanding of our world that leads us to put so much weight on sustainable design.

Waste ends up in landfills and becomes unusable matter. Since sustainable building designs use recycled materials and are reusable, we don’t have to dig into the actual environment and extract raw materials. The longer we can put to use limited resources that we absolutely need, the longer our environment has time to recharge and replenish its resources to be used for future generations. Modular buildings are green by this very standard. They use recycled materials and the modular structures are reusable themselves, so the original raw materials get put to use in longer lifecycles, giving our renewable resources more time to recharge.

So to conclude, we exist as part of a delicate interrelation of human societies and ecosystems. If something harmful happens to an ecosystem, this in turn will damage human society and vice versa. It is in our best interest to build structures that use up as little of the environment’s resources as possible, so that in the future we can continue to have resources to work with.

It’s interesting how the explosion in technological advances in the modular building industry coincided with the rising global awareness of the green movement. Coincidence? Act of fate? Or maybe it couldn’t have been otherwise…

Whatever the case, the fact of the matter is that we are now painfully aware of the human impact on the ecosystem and the environment in general. Climate changes due to global warming, energy shortages, depleting fresh water stores, collapsing ecosystems, and other environmental problems have been made fully present in today’s public awareness. In the last 30 years, the picture painted by these problems was pretty bleak. Basically, corporations were recklessly destroying the environment in pursuit of profit, and the general character of mankind was seen to be squandering natural resources daily, natural resources that we took for granted but that wouldn’t be around for much longer. Soon the earth would be an inhospitable wasteland and we would be obliterated.

However, that’s not the picture we see today. The green movement has reached a critical stage in which businesses and concerned individuals have embraced environmentalism and the pursuit of green technology. Whereas in the past, going green was seen as expensive and impractical and was resisted, today going green is seen as actually profitable and cost-saving and a necessary pursuit for the good of our future generations. We are beginning to see the development of a bright, optimistic view of our environment and the future. Population growth is stabilizing and the existing population is more aware of human effect on the environment than ever.

Instead of just advancing for the sake of advancing, modern technology is advancing carefully, taking care not to “tread all over the grass.” Technology is now green-oriented, focusing on energy conservation, efficiency, and waste elimination.  Modern technological advances are not only focusing on human benefit, as they were before, but balancing that with environmental benefit and doing a great job of managing the two while still bounding forward, in my opinion. That’s brilliance right there.

Modern modular construction is a big part of the green technology movement, seeing as how construction waste makes up more than 30% of landfill waste. With the reusability and recyclability of modular systems, construction waste could be virtually eliminated if modular construction advances as the standard method of construction. Modular systems are made from completely recyclable materials, which helps. But one of the greenest aspects of modular buildings is their reusability. If you build a modular building intended to carry out a certain function out of universal, modular parts, you can break those parts down and rearrange the parts to build another building that can carry out a completely different function.

This is a profound advantage that carries benefits that are two-fold. Not only are you cutting down on waste from having to destroy a building and dispose of the debris, but you are saving on the energy and resources that it takes to construct a whole other building. This is an elegant solution to construction waste if I don’t say so myself, and a sign of the beginnings of a new, bright age of clean, green technology.

Time is Money and with The Economy in Flux, Successful Businesses look at a Fast New Building Product to Stay In Front

As businesses change, so do their facility’s needs. In this day and age slowing down is simply not an option. Downsizing and expansion both require changes in physical space; prefabricated modular wall systems can accomplish both these tasks with minimal impact on productivity or workflow.

Businesses today must meet the changing business environment quickly and intelligently. Using prefabricated modular products can save companies tremendous amounts of time and money. The look of modular has become so streamlined that it is virtually indistinguishable from standard construction; however, the cost savings, non-intrusiveness, flexibility, and reduced environmental impact of modular truly makes it the best business solution on the market.

Standard stud and drywall construction causes enormous strain on companies looking to transform their workspace. “Many organizations overlook the productivity lost during a lengthy construction project; the cost of downtime can be staggering! Invasive drywall dust, sanding, and painting can become a thing of the past, although few companies have realized that prefabricated modular building systems are available and are a better solution” said Scott Nielsen, LEED Certified Operations Manager of Allied Modular.

Now, modular construction, which is pre-manufactured before arriving at a job site, eases the strain on companies looking to modify their facilities. Offices, lunchrooms, conference rooms, and a host of other applications can be completed in days instead of months, with very little impact on the operations of the organization and by purchasing prior to year end; you can maximize your tax benefits under http://www.section179.org/section_179_deduction.html [IRS tax law, section 179].

In addition to providing a non-intrusive and highest-quality business solution, prefabricated modular products offer myriad other advantages over standard construction. Modular products can be reused and relocated with very little effort or financial impact. Also, modular companies like Allied Modular Building Systems manufacture building solutions that are environmentally friendly using only recyclable materials and small installation crews, the carbon footprint on the environment is as minimal as the impact on your company’s productivity.