Goal for 50% of homes to be green

Source: Xinhua | 2017-05-05

CHINA pledged that half of the houses to be built by 2020 will be “green buildings,” which is expected to boost building energy efficiency by 20 percent from 2015, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development said yesterday.

Smart buildings and modular buildings — prefabricated models that are built at a factory and then brought to a construction site to be stacked together — will help upgrade the structure of China’s building industry as the area of modular buildings is forecast to take up 15 percent of the newly built homes by 2020, the ministry said.

Modular buildings save 50 percent of the construction time compared with the traditional method, according to ModSpace, a US-based construction company.

China sees the gross output of the building industry to grow 7 percent annually from 18.1 trillion yuan (US$2.6 trillion) in 2015 to 2020, down from 13.48 percent annually from 2011 to 2014, the ministry said.