The Most Sustainable Buildings

November 5, 2025

For my sustainability industry colleagues attending Greenbuild, you’ve all heard the phrase, “the most sustainable building is the one already built.”

That is only partially true. What if that existing building is located in the middle of suburban sprawl, with limited access beyond single occupancy vehicles - no or infrequent public transit, no safe streets for walking, cycling, and micromobility? We all know that sprawl drives emissions, and that simply designing and building urban infill projects is about 2x more sustainable than the next measure being taken - whether its energy efficiency, electrification, water and waste reduction, or improving internal supply chain methods.

The more that we locate buildings where we need to rely on cars, the more that we have to build roadways and parking spaces for cars, leading to this perpetual cycle of more sprawl and higher transportation emissions.

Through the great work of built environment sustainability professionals, we’ve become more efficient on a per square foot basis in our buildings, but what if we were to expand that focus to be more efficient on a per person basis - essentially how we move.

EVs are great but they still consume a lot of energy. If we are truly doing our job as sustainability professionals, we have to factor in the significant portion of emission reduction goals that land use and transportation requires from us. Everything is connected. This means bringing more urban planning and transportation professionals into the world of sustainable real estate.

With that said, I’m happy to see that the implementation of LEED v5 is now factoring scope 3 emissions and decarbonization strategies more, and that land use and TDM strategies have a heavier weight towards the overall scoring, aligning with certifications such as ActiveScore and ModeScore.

So if I were to edit the “most sustainable building” phrase, it would be “the most sustainable building is the one already built, that is in a walkable location, connects to transit, and has in-building and on-street infrastructure that encourages active transportation.”