Introducing natural ventilation in selected Malaysian Hotels for environmental sustainability
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Date
2009-07
Authors
Azusa Ikeda
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Abstract
Shortage of natural resources and environmental poftutions are considered as
signs of global warming and a serious world climatic threat in the last few
decades. Hence, environmental conservation has been increasing important to
all sectors of the economy for the countries. Though there are many tourism
authorities that have created the standards or certifications for environmentally
sustainable hotels, very few Malaysia hotels have policies addressing the issues.
This study aims to define the current state of environmental policy in Malaysian
hotel industry, and proposing the effective and practical method for Malaysian
environmental hotels. This is an exploratory research in applying passive
building design in the aspect of natural ventilation as one of the significant and
effective method in attempting at reducing energy in hotels. The case study
conducted tested efficiency of natural ventilation as one ofthe passive elements,
for beach hotels and hilltop hotels. The air temperature, relative humidity and
wind velocity were observed by using BABUK environmental logger and
Standard Effective Temperature (SET) is calculated from the three air factors in
order to compare with comfortable temperature for Malaysia. Condusions from
the research proved the hypothesis that the use of natural ventilation in public
spaces, hotel lobbies in particular can reduce energy without compromising on
comfort.
Questionnaire survey and field survey were carried out to grasp the present
condition of Malaysian hotels whilst doing comparative studies on wortd
standards from the literature review. Findings of this study show that Malaysian
hotels lacked in consideration and knowledge for envirormentally sustainability
with ineffective use of medlanical equipments and systems. This study is
concluded with the suggestions that (1) Malaysian hotel industry requires setting
up environmental guidelines and/or certification to improve its sustainability and
provide knowledge and skills of environmental programs, (2) manipulation of
passive building design elemens to improve environmental sustainability for
hotel industry, therefore the guidelines created should have this consideration as
a priority.
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Keywords
Natural ventilation , Malaysian Hotels , Environmental sustainability