While household mould growth has been increasingly highlighted in response to its adverse health outcomes and building management burden, studies are reviewed respectively from perspective of epidemiological survey, or building technology. This paper thus presents a literature review to address the building environment and mould exposure in homes, including the mould growth and exposure characteristics, interaction with building features, design requirements from current standards.

With the high growth urbanization and increasing new urban population, the huge demand for infrastructures and dwellings has become a great challenge for the sustainable development in Chinese cities. The building sector shares one fourth of total energy consumption in the country and plays an important role in reducing the energy consumption and the consequential greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Some policies have been issued for promoting the low carbon sustainable development in China's buildings.

Cost savings from efficiency gains are at the core of the green building business case. Significantly lower energy bills are said to be a major factor in the green rent premium observed in earlier studies. Our study tests this relationship by inferring energy costs from operating expenses for a large dataset of U.S. office buildings and relating them to rental rates. We find that eco-certification is associated with a higher than anticipated total energy expenditure, which is the opposite of its expected effect.