One-Step Building Company Promotes Green Building

Want to build your very own dream house? Perhaps you would like it to be completely environmentally friendly?

Ask around you and most people who have ventured into building homes will tell you the dream can quickly turn into something that feels more like a nightmare.

How do you coordinate between the architect, the contractor, the landscaper, the builders, the green advisors?

That’s where a new Israeli environmental building company has decided to come in – coordinating with all parties, to “build the most technologically-advanced green homes.”

Wawa, founded in 2008 by Sam Alfassy, a computer engineer, and Yuval Shem-Ur, an architect, aims to make it easier for Israelis to build green homes. According to Alfassi, the difficulty with green homes is that “one green building advisor or architect knows only a narrow aspect of environmental building.  What Wawa does,” Alfassi added, “is to integrate technologies that are already used in mainstream building, and integrate them in green architecture.”

“The added value of the company is that WAWA focuses on green building and only that”, Alfassy told NoCamels. “And that’s important,” because “today, green building in Israel is considered only a byproduct”.

So how does it work? WAWA is there from the early stages of planning. The company introduces their team of green advisors, together with the architect. “The target for us is to make the green aspect worthwhile economically as well.”

WAWA then focuses planning on five categories: living standards, energy, water, materials and sustainability. The next step is to check the environmental “points” of the planning, through Israel’s Standards Institute.

WAWA now has 40 buildings in process around Israel. The company charges clients based on the size and type of project.

Alfassy believes Israel’s green building market is only in its early stages and has the potential to grow much more. “For the moment Israel is behind the rest of the world when it comes to green building,” the company’s CEO said, but the industry is growing fast. According the Standards Institute, “Israel has made major 6-year progress, in only a year and half time”.

Article By Tzachi Zamir
Photo by  NCA Chen Architects