Today everyone is chanting the mantra of green - in environment, agriculture, architecture or products. However knowing how subjective we can be on our opinions and argue in favour of our personal ideas, how do we ensure that we all agree on what green means? Without a commonly understood and agreed upon criteria for identifying the green, say in building materials, we will not be able to converge on a larger agenda of sustainable buildings. Many institutions have strived towards defining the characteristics of materials, mainly BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards), TERI (The Energy and Resource Institute), IGBC (Indian Green Building Council) to name a few. Considering that many experts have worked for years to arrive at the norms for assessing building materials, the standards stated by these have come to stay as yardsticks for today. In an over simplified manner, the following are the major parameters.

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