Nowon-gu becomes the first district to receive a full ZEB Grade 4 certification for a public building, a year ahead of the government mandate. Eight more public buildings under design or construction are set to follow, with three already holding preliminary certifications and the Hwarangdae Railway Park community center in the pipeline.
Seoul's Nowon-gu (district mayor Seo Jun-o) announced that its newly built Upcycling Center has received a Grade 4 Zero-Energy Building (ZEB) full certification from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.
The certification marks the first result of the district's mandatory ZEB Grade 4 policy for public buildings, established under a carbon neutrality construction guideline Nowon-gu adopted in August 2024.
Completed with a target opening in November, the center is a community-oriented resource-circulation hub designed to promote upcycling culture. The building spans one below-ground floor and five above-ground floors, with a total floor area of 1,300.02 square meters. Its interior will include a repair and mending space, an exhibition and retail area with a café, a children's hands-on experience zone, a lecture room, an upcycling laboratory and a recycling center.
The building features a high-insulation, high-airtightness envelope and renewable energy systems, with a focus on minimizing energy consumption during operation.
The center combines building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) and conventional solar power generation (PV) as its renewable energy systems, using the building's exterior as a power-generating surface while also producing electricity from unused spaces such as the rooftop. This allowed the building to meet the ZEB Grade 4 certification requirement of an energy self-sufficiency rate of at least 40 percent.
Nowon-gu has established and operates a zero-energy building guideline one to two years ahead of the central government's own ZEB mandate roadmap. The government made Grade 4 or higher certification mandatory for public buildings with a total floor area of at least 1,000 square meters starting in 2025. Nowon-gu had already decided to apply the Grade 4 standard to public buildings of 500 square meters or more from 2024.
The district has required ZEB certification to be reviewed from the earliest stage of project planning and for Grade 4 standards to be reflected from the design competition phase onward.
Other public buildings in the district are expected to follow with their own ZEB certifications. The Taereung Eoulim Library, a youth startup center and the Yeongchuksan Forest Complex Experience Center have all completed preliminary ZEB Grade 4 certification. A new community center to be built at Hwarangdae Railway Park is also in the process of obtaining preliminary certification. The district plans to pursue ZEB Grade 4 or higher certification for other public buildings currently under design or construction on a rolling basis.
The district's focus on carbon neutrality in construction stems from research showing that buildings account for 68.3 percent of local greenhouse gas emissions. Nowon-gu has been designated the only "carbon-neutral leading city" in the Greater Seoul metropolitan area, having laid out carbon neutrality goals and action plans as it undertakes a large-scale rebuilding of aging apartments — those more than 30 years old — and urban infrastructure.
"The full ZEB Grade 4 certification of the Upcycling Center demonstrates that Nowon-gu is taking a leading role in carbon-neutral construction," a district official said. "We will continue to deliver results through public buildings so that carbon-neutral construction solutions and pioneering models can spread to the private sector."
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