Maronda Homes Takes Steps To Become Even More Sustainable in 2022
According to Census, new home construction is up 22% year over year. This means more land being obtained and more products being produced. Unfortunately, it’s inevitable — sometimes wildlife must be destroyed in order to create a community full of spacious homesites, and a large quantity of brand-new building materials must be acquired to provide homes to families across the nation.
At Maronda Homes, we’re taking steps to become more environmentally sound.
BEE Smart Energy Program
First and foremost is our commitment to providing energy-efficient homes through our tailor-made BEE Smart Program. According to the Home Energy Rating System (HERS) Index, homes built by Maronda are 40% more efficient than typical new homes built to code and 25% more efficient than ENERGY STAR® homes. This means every home we build exceeds the strict guidelines the ENERGY STAR® program sets forth.
This is better for the environment and delivers our homebuyers better quality, comfort, and durability. It also reduces utility costs for all our homebuyers. Over the years, you can expect to save thousands of dollars alone just in energy costs.
Learn more about our energy efficiency program here.
Check out the full Maronda Homes BEE Smart Certification Quality Checklist below:
Limiting Construction Waste
There’s no doubt that homebuilders have been working tirelessly through crippling supply chains, record-high lumber prices, and significant labor shortages during the pandemic. One positive takeaway from this is we’re now able to focus on ways to cut back on construction waste.
With careful strategic planning and more time due to material shortages, we can now pinpoint the exact amount of materials needed to produce a home. This means fewer materials upfront and less product wasted. This is less expensive and also not as harsh on the environment.
To put things in perspective, wood alone accounts for 40%-50% of residential construction waste. To become more sustainable and help offset lumber price increases, we have been implementing steel studs into our homes. Other popular waste reduction strategies among builders include recycling wood for mulch and composting operations such as animal bedding, landfill cover, and other building products.
Paperless Productivity
To extend Maronda’s carbon footprint, our company and model centers are transitioning to be paperless. With the launch of our new website, we implemented color visualizers, 360 tours, and interactive floorplans to our digital presence. We also utilize Docusign, a software to sign documents electronically, to eliminate the need to print contracts and use scanners. Not only does this allow homebuyers to now design and participate in part of the transaction online, but it also cuts back on paper and warehousing shipping. We’re also able to update all documents in real-time with any changes necessary when they’re digital. In all, going paperless reduces costs, increases efficiency, and provides easier, quicker access for our homebuyers – all while cutting energy use and decreasing the amount of waste dumped into landfills.
You can find digital-PDF downloads for all of our floorplans, included features, brochures, and more on our website.
Brand New Home, Brand New Landscape
On top of our BEE Smart Energy Homes and company-wide paperless initiative, we offer various landscape packages to our home buyers. We enhance the landscape of our communities by planting grass, trees, bushes, plants, and more to make up for all the wildlife torn down during the development stage. In all communities, we highly encourage planting trees and starting your own personal garden; in some communities, planting trees and creating a garden is a part of the contract.
We also offer various resources on our blog to help you become more sustainable. For example, here are five simple ways to cut back on energy use and costs in your home.
At Maronda, we recognize that any building construction can impact the environment. That’s why we actively take steps to make our homes and construction process more energy-efficient and provide our homeowners with ways to become more sustainable.