Green building makes it to mainstream.

The International Center for Photography's gallery, decked out with photographs depicting large scale environmental changes across the globe, may have once seemed an unlikely place for a panel discussion with east coast corporate executives.

But when green architect, Robert Fox, moderated a discussion there this week, George David, CEO of United Technology Corporation, a Fortune 500 development company and Thomas Leppert, CEO and chairman of the Turner Construction Company, confirmed that green building has become so marketable, even the toughest execs can maintain industry respectability by focusing on the bottom line.

"We don't do this because we are good people. We don't ask our shareholders to contribute because we want to convince them that we are good people and could you please help us do something good for the environment. No we have these partners and shareholders contribute because it is good business," David said.

As green building has become so popularized it is almost a cliche, it may be difficult to believe we are only six years away from the time when the United States Green Building Council's LEED certification first came out. The profit motive helped to bind the popularity of this trend for shareholders, Leppert said

"We have an industry that probably moves at the rate of a snail, and it sometimes takes a while for a new idea to take hold. Now that the idea has caught on, it is the exception for someone to question why we are doing green building," Leppert said.

The fact that green building has always been privately motivated--spearheaded both by the US Green Building Council and developers --both fills industry executives with pride and helps them maintain their corporate edge. "The profit motive always works better to effect markets than government regulations," David said.

"When I first heard about green building, I was skeptical. Later, I started to look at some of the photographs of the effects of global warming in places like the Arctic and Greenland and I started to understand how important it was," Leppert said. "Turner has stuck with green building both for that reason and because we understand this is where our customers are going."

The popularity of green building also helps assure that the company survives for the next generation, Leppert said.

"We are much more competitive on recruiting now for young people in college who understand green building because this is the way that they think," Leppert said. "Now you are default on a college campus if you build a building and it is not green."

Green building uses obvious methods to make good business sense, as when United converts waste into natural gas and reuses it, or uses regenerative elevators that capture the ascending energy load and reuses it and uses 75% less energy than comparable elevators did a decade ago. Even a hardboiled environmentalist would have to admit that the offshoot of their sound business practices, such as the minute 2% of greenhouse gasses United Products--which manufactures, among other things, helicopters and rockets--produces helps preserve the environment.

The reasons green building will have longevity are because, ultimately, it is healthier for human beings, Leppert said.

As an example, he cited the Third Creek Elementary school in Statesville, North Carolina, the first elementary school in the nation to be certified LEED gold, and whose green renovation was attributed to a 20% increase in children reading at grade level within a few short years. The trend may also last in the market as the chlorophyll has seemed to seep into the executive's blood.

"I have trained my eye now to look for waste, and everywhere I look there it is, it is heart-stopping." David said. "When the lights are turned on and nobody is in the room, when the heat is on and nobody is in the room, that's waste, when you are sitting in traffic in the city of New York, that's waste." David said. "I can see waste everywhere and it drives me nuts."