Responsible Products Programme
A vision for a better future, for buildings and products.
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Green Star recognises innovation and efforts to carve out new ways of building sustainably. Often these sit outside the current benchmarks laid out in the tool, however points are awarded under a seperate 'Innovation' credit. This recognises new initiates with a significant sustainability benefit.
Each project can submit up to 10 innovations to be considered for approval, for a maximum of 10 points towards a Green Star rating.
If you have an idea for an innovation in your project, we encourage you to talk to us as early in the process as possible.
1. After reviewing the section for Innovation in the Green Star Submission Guidelines, your Green Star Accredited Professional will then need to registers a project’s interest in targeting an Innovation with the NZGBC.
2. You will then need to submit a completed Innovation submission using the template below. This outlines the initiative, its sustainability benefits and relevance in New Zealand.
3. Documentation will then need to be submitted for assessment after registration but before Round Two).
Project teams can provide partial documents or full documents in a 'Pre-Round One' or 'Pre-Round Two' review for each proposed innovation. If the innovation is granted conditionally pending further documentation, all the remaining documents need to be provided in either Round One or Round Two assessment. Innovations can't be targeted after Round Two.
In addition to innovations claimed by projects, both Green Star and Homestar have published a list of innovation challenges. These recognise initiatives that don’t currently fit in to the main framework of these tools but that we believe are important to encourage and recognise. They cover environmental, social and economic sustainability initiatives. While some challenges only apply to some tools, others across all our tools. Several current innovation challenges were originally published by the Green Building Council of Australia for Green Star projects there, but have been adapted for Green Star and Homestar projects in New Zealand.
Click here to go see the Table of Innovation Challenges
You are welcome to submit a new challenge relating to sustainability issues you would like to address
The submission template is developed to assist your project with an innovation submission – these will be submitted to us by your Green Star Accredited Professional (GSAP)
We’ve already recognised some incredible New Zealand buildings for innovative design and strategies.
These submissions, from NZGBC’s own office fit-out, will give you an idea of what NZGBC expects.
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Understanding eligibility for an RPV
The Responsible Products programme recognises initiatives that certify products available for use in the built environment. We rely on third party initiatives or product certification initiatives to assess the impact that a product has against the five criteria described above.
Initiatives are required to demonstrate compliance with the minimum expectations and a selection of the technical criteria. Once these have been met, an initiative will be recognised, and an RPV will be awarded. The programme assigns RPVs to initiatives and these are passed onto the products they recognise. The RPV is assigned to the initiative, not directly to any product itself.
See here how an RPV is used in Green Star:
The Responsible Products Score Checker
Example of how the score checker works for a product certified by two initiatives:
3.The Responsible Product Value (RPV) will then be displayed at the bottom of the page. Adding multiple initiative will display the value based on that combination. (Note that the value may not be the sum of the individual values)
For Green Star Buildings - Download the Responsible Products Excel Calculator here.
For Design & As Built – check out the Design & As Built section below.
4. Select the relevant initiative and Copy the resulting RPV into the Excel Calculator. (Note that if the initiative is part of the scorechecker but does not appear in the excel drop down, it can be manually added in the Introduction tab.)
5. The project team puts the necessary information into the calculator, including the associated RPV collected from the Responsible Product Score Checker.
6. The initiative score checker has been created to allow users to view the RPV for each product certification initiative as well as initiative combinations - access the score checker here