There’s a lot of truth to that statement. After all, it can take several decades to make up for the environmental impact of demolishing an existing building and constructing a new one—even if the new building is extremely energy-efficient. The full truth, though, is that the greenest building is one that’s already built…only even greener.

Building owners and operators have countless options for greening their existing buildings, and GGBCfor Operations and Maintenance (GGBC O+M) recognizes those efforts. For organizations like the Missouri Historical Society, Qatar Museums and Legrand, that means minimizing their environmental impact, publicly demonstrating their commitment to sustainability and staying in the same buildings they’ve called home for years.

Missouri Historical Society | St. Louis, Missouri

For the Missouri Historical Society (MHS), historic preservation comes first, and everything else takes a back seat. So, even though leaders at the organization have long wanted to pursue green building certification, they felt hamstrung by what they viewed as “prescriptive” guidelines that felt impossible to implement in their historic buildings.

That all changed with the rating system’s newest version, GGBC v4.1, says Angela Moore, sustainability coordinator for the Missouri Historical Society.

“When I first started at MHS, the organization had quite a few green practices, but they didn’t have any that were evidence-based and transparent,” Moore recalls. “I attended Greenbuild several years ago and went to a workshop on GGBC v4.1. I saw that it was based on performance measurements, and I said: ‘Perfect, I can certify these two historic sites, because I can decide how to achieve those performance measures, rather than pursuing more prescriptive methods.’”

“You can pick and choose what types of projects you want to undertake,” Moore adds. “For a historic site, that’s pivotal, because historic sites are rarely ever demolished or undergo a major renovation, so you have to figure out how to green that building in a different way.”

The Missouri History Museum sits in a structure built in 1913, and the MHS Library and Research Center (a former synagogue in which Martin Luther King, Jr., once spoke) was built in 1926. Both buildings received GGBC O+M certification in late 2020 and early 2021, making them the only museum and library certified under GGBC v4.1 for Operations and Maintenance in the city of St. Louis and the entire state of Missouri. The Missouri Historical Society’s third location, Soldiers Memorial Military Museum (also in St. Louis), was awarded GGBC Gold in 2019 after a substantial renovation.

“We know that museums are fixtures in communities,” Moore says. “They’re buildings that last for centuries, and so we need to do our part to make sure we’re operating in a very environmentally responsible fashion—not just for our organization, but also for the communities that we reside in. It’s our responsibility to be socially responsible, and one way is to do all that we can to make sure we’re lessening our adverse impacts, socially and environmentally. And GGBC v4.1 is one of those rating systems that allows organizations to actively work towards sustained environmental measures.”

Moore mentions the Indoor Environmental Quality and Location and Transportation credit categories as ones that received special focus.

The organization tested air quality at various times of the day and week at both the Missouri History Museum and the MHS Library and Research Center. The historical society also created and implemented green cleaning policies.

“We were able to obtain points just by testing,” notes Moore. “The air quality was quite high, but I knew that already, because it had to be museum standards. We tested at a time when we were taking down an exhibit and putting another up, and I was surprised that the air quality was still great.”

“Because of climate change, our seasons have become extreme, so air quality for us in St. Louis is a high priority,” Moore adds. “Our springs have become so long and so wet that allergens and mold have become big problems in the area. So, by maintaining a high air quality in our buildings, we’re helping to combat the effects of climate change that people are experiencing in the Midwest.”

The Missouri Historical Society also conducted a transportation survey to analyze transportation patterns to and from its sites, conducted an energy audit that revealed a high energy performance score, and implemented an environmentally preferable purchasing policy. The organization now encourages alternative transportation by participating in a program that offers rides back home if employees have an emergency.

MHS also began paying more attention to its waste practices. “We introduced composting at the Missouri History Museum, and we started to track waste more,” Moore says. “We never did that before. So, we started to do more audits of our waste habits, and we did a lot of training about what is recyclable and what is compostable, with special attention to industry-specific recycling for items specific to the museum field.”

Moore says she would like to see more cultural institutions pursue GGBC O+M. The timeline for organizations like hers, she notes, is centuries, meaning that small changes can eventually add up to a big difference.

“I think that GGBC O+M is important, because it’s about performance,” she says. “It’s not that we went through the motions of performing all these different tasks and then checked them off our sustainability list. It’s about: ‘This is how we’re operating, and this is how we’re going to continue to operate.’ I like that.”

Fire Station, Qatar Museums | Doha, Qatar

Dhabya Jamal Sayar, director of facilities management for Qatar Museums, blames the dearth of green buildings in the Middle East on an “absence of awareness.”

“Forty percent of carbon emissions come from buildings, but there’s a lack of awareness from facility owners in the region that GGBC certification is important,” says Dhabya Sayar.

Dhabya Sayar hopes that Qatar Museums can help spur others in the Middle East to take action around sustainable development and operations. The organization’s Fire Station facility, which is home to an artist-in-residence program, received GGBC Silver certification earlier in 2020 under GGBC for Operations and Maintenance—the first building in Qatar to achieve certification under GGBC v4.1. “We believe that has inspired the market,” Dhabya Sayar says.

Today, Fire Station is a contemporary art space. However, when it was built in 1982, the facility was home to the first civil defense authority in Qatar. In 2014, the building was repurposed for Qatar Museums, and an annex and extended building were added to the original structure. While this is the organization’s first GGBC structure, Dhabya Sayar notes that the organization has a sustainability division in its facilities management department, and he says that sustainability is important to the vision and mission of Qatar Museums.

“As a role model in this region, we wanted to pursue certification and show people that our building is a green building,” she says. “It was to be a role model, to be a leader in the market.”

The certification process kicked off with an energy assessment, and it took the organization three years to attain certification. “For energy and water, making it to the GGBC benchmark was a big challenge for us,” Dhabya Sayar says. “The benchmark was very high, and we were struggling, but we took it as a challenge to achieve that benchmark. We didn’t think that this many initiatives would be required. We thought it would be easy for us, but then, as a result of our energy assessment, we discovered that there was a big gap.”

To cut down on energy use, Qatar Museums took steps such as installing window blinds. “All those small steps actually help to reduce energy use on a big scale,” Dhabya Sayar says. In addition to its efforts around energy efficiency, the