by Zheng Xiaoyi     

    SINGAPORE, April 21 (Xinhua) -- Singapore has attached great importance to its environmental protection for decades. In recent months, it has unveiled a series of measures to make the city-state more energy efficient.

    The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) is looking into amending the Building Control Act to impose minimum requirements on environmental sustainability for new buildings to follow.

    When it happens, all new buildings will have to achieve the basic standard of Green Mark certification, which rates buildings on their environmental impact and performance.

    Buildings rated green are those which are designed, built and maintained for energy efficiency and better for human health. For instance, such buildings have efficient air-conditioning systems to make temperatures comfortable and better ventilation to improve indoor air quality.

    According to several initiatives launched last December, all new public buildings, including public housing, must be Green Mark certified from April 1. Furthermore, those developers who use green building technologies extensively will be rewarded of the 20million Singapore dollars (about 13 million U.S. dollars) Green Mark Incentive Scheme.

    Another 50 million Singapore dollars (about 32.5 million U.S. dollars) research fund for the next five years was aimed to intensify research and development efforts in green building technologies and energy efficiency.

    Now the incentives to go green may become law, which has shown the Singapore government's determination to shift to eco-friendly buildings.

    The BCA has promised to work closely with the industry concerned when drafting the law and pointed out that no date has been set for the law to kick in.

    Even the response from industry players has been encouraging, watchers pointed out that not everyone has been ready to go green.

    Going green means more costs. It is estimated that adopting green features could raise construction costs by 5 to 10 percent.

    While the construction sector, architects, material suppliers and developers would all have to take more efforts to achieve green status.

    The task of converting existing buildings to become green may be a bigger one, because owners have to spend money upfront to make buildings green. So industry players hope that the government agencies will launch more incentives to help the developers and owners to cut down costs of going green.

    Not only commercial and public buildings, but also residential projects should be green.

    The Singapore government unveiled its first green public housing project last month, which will have eco-friendly features, including corridor lights powered by solar panels, common areas washed by recycled rainwater and plants growing vertically covering the exterior of walls.

    While a green building is likely to involve higher development cost, Minister of State for National Development Grace Fu pointed out recently that the savings gained from operating a green building would more than offset the higher upfront cost.

    She also believed that with widespread adoption of green building technologies, the construction cost will also decline.

    Furthermore, the country launched a new campaign to encourage people use reusable bags when go shopping, in a bid to cut use of plastic bags.

    Singapore's National Environment Agency (NEA) has asked all the Shoppers to bring their own carriers to supermarkets once a month, if shoppers don't get their own bags, they will be requested to donate 10 cents for each plastic bag they take.

    On the first Bring Your Own Bag Day this Wednesday, the response from shoppers were positive. Some retailer chains said at least half the customers brought their own bags and these supermarkets cut the number of plastic bags by up to 60 percent.

    Singapore consumes 2.5 billion plastic bags a year, or about 625 bags per person each year. And burning a ton of waste plastic bags produces almost 2,900 kg of carbon dioxide--the organizers cite these figures to raise people's awareness of environment protection.

    In addition, the Singapore government is mulling over the national energy efficiency plan, aimed to help reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that cause global warming.

    The latest step the Singapore government took was to develop the island state as a center for research in environment sustainability.

    With growing concerns about the global environment, Singapore needs to have long term sustainable solutions for the supply of water and clean energy.