The incidence of projects claiming they aim for green rating standards, but don’t bother to certify them, is greenwash.
At our Passive House debate in May we were taken aback by one of the audience members who leaned in at the end of the night to share that they’d built a Passive House but that they were a bit disappointed with the result. It had overheated a bit, and worse, the mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) had issues and the suppliers had failed to respond to repeated requests to amend the problems.
Perhaps the two things were connected, we couldn’t help but surmise but as we chatted it emerged that the house was not a certified Passive House build nor its construction managed by a PH professional.
Hmmm. The committed members of this movement would shake their heads and say, no surprise there were issues.
But the point is that we’ve come across a number of projects over the years where developers or designer have told us their project is 5 or 6 Star Green Star equivalent but was not certified as such.
The outcomes were Green Star “equivalent”, they said.
We’ve even seen people claim Nightingale Housing-equivalent status, but missing a seriously large equity component in the project that in our minds made the project aligned design wise – but not in fundamental outcomes for which Nightingale gained its fame.
You can argue that a rising tide lifts all boats and that the building and development industry is much greener than it ever was or might have been. With or without correctly certified buildings. True.
But the latest incident we came across was a hospital that claimed it was targeting a 5 Star Green Star equivalent outcome, which we dutifully reported. But before long we had one of those polite requests from the Green Building Council we receive from time to time, requesting we remove the offending lines. The building was not Green Star but it did have an equivalency rating from the developer NSW Health Infrastructure.
We hadn’t had one of those polite requests for quite a while but knew that the incidence of riffing off a hard-won rating standard was hardly unknown. And something piqued about a government department doing it.
It turned out it was a simple miscommunication among the sources for the project but still we wanted to understand where this problem was sitting for the GBCA, given their impact in the market.
And given there’s huge investment that goes in to creating rating tools where none existed before.
According to Jorge Chapa it’s been a periodic problem for the GBCA for more than a decade.
“You either go through the process of certification or not. And if you haven’t gone through that rigorous third-party independent process, you don’t have a Green Star rating. There’s no equivalency attached to it,” Chapa said.
“You would not allow these claims to be made for any other certification.”
Chapa is not alone. There’s a certain frustration that breaks through on many fronts over false green claims. Climate advocacy group organisation Comms Declare has built a strong profile on calling out such greenwash.
And the issue on certification came publicly to the fore in about 2022 when the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission signalled it would pursue unverified sustainability claims.
The GBCA picked up the theme at the time with an article by chief executive Davina Rooney, All that glitters is not green, and again with its Certification Counts campaign.
Chapa told The Fifth Estate that with generative AI tools the problem could now resurface and worsen.
He also pointed to the Australian government’s Sustainable Procurement Guide which states that “projects claiming to meet Green Star requirements without certification are potentially in breach of trademark rules and may be accused of greenwashing”.
The practice has now somewhat abated.
“We used to see a lot, a lot more of it. I think we’ve been communicating to people regularly now: ‘You can’t do that. It is a protected trademark’.
“Over time people have recognised that there’s value to the trademark.”
Chapa said the problem was more common in Green Star’s earlier years.
This was when the rating tools covered “a narrower band of buildings and certification pathways were still maturing, so some project teams reached for equivalency simply because a suitable rating didn’t yet exist. That gap has closed significantly since.”
And the organisation keeps pumping out more certifications.
Cost is not the major issue Chapa said, unless you look at a huge tower, where modest proportion of cost can add up to big nominal number.
“On average the cost of delivering a certified green building is about 2 per cent (lower for 4 Stars, slightly higher for 6 Stars).
“This cost includes the certification and assessment fee (which varies but is on average about 0.04 per cent), the documentation cost (on average 0.2 per cent), and the rest (around 1.6 to 2 per cent) being the cost of the green building interventions, that is, everything from energy efficiency to the materials to commissioning services.”
In the year to 30 June 2025 there were 1951 certifications issued, taking the overall total to 7616 buildings, Chapa said.
About 33 per cent are offices, 32 per cent industrial, 19 per cent retail, 7 per cent residential, 5 per cent education with the remainder spread between healthcare, community, public buildings and civic centres, hotels, sports infrastructure and rail and transport infrastructure, “each at 2 per cent or less”.
