GBlist: Green Building Council LEED and environmental benchmarking
rwatson@nrdc.org
Wed, 19 Feb 1997 12:40:01 -0500
I'm heading up the committee of people trying to develop and bring the
LEED system to market. I'd like to follow up with some comments about
the Green Building council's LEED rating system and what I perceive to
be some confusion about what LEED is and is not.
The intent of LEED is to provide a designation that will allow
buildings to distinguish themselves as having been designed "green".
There is so much greenwash in the market these days, the Green
Building Council felt that if some third party could come up with a
system based on a set of criteria that was relatively transparent and
easy to use, we could provide a market push for green buildings.
Please note that the current system is only applicable to new or
substantially-renovated commercial building DESIGN. As many people
will point out, the O&M of a building over time can be as important as
the original design, but we felt that it would be too costly and
onerous to begin with a system that required detailed inspection
and/or auditing. The notion of rating a green building must be
accepted first, before a more complicated program can be launched. My
guess that is one of the reasons that the Good Cents Green Home
initiative is having trouble getting launched: It appears to be very
comprehensive, but it's a pain in the neck for builders to apply and
comply, which in residential construction is a death-knell.
LEED has 10 prerequisites and 13 design criteria areas, ranging from
building materials to water quality, that are assigned credits. Each
additional environmental measure is given a credit, regardless of its
difficulty. There are four levels of compliance, Bronze, Silver, Gold
and Platinum, depending upon the number of total points received out
of those possible. The system combines performance and prescriptive
measures, using established standards as reference points. For
example, 2 points are given for beating ASHRAE 90.1 by 20% and 5 for
50% better. Obviously, the total energy consumed by a building that
beats ASHRAE by 50% in Miami, will be different from a building in
Chicago, yet they still get the same credit. Not great, but I can't
think of anything better that's possible within the next year or
five...
Which brings me to "benchmarking". LEED is not really intended to
perform benchmarking which at this stage, in my opinion, can't be done
meaningfully. I don't believe that it is possible to compare
environmental problems across media in an objective fashion. If we
want to get "majority opinion" to agree than one thing is better or
worse than another that's fine, but let's be aware that it is a
subjective judgment. It may be easier to establishe "knock-out"
criteria: if it does "X", it is unacceptable. Then you simply ban it
and let it go away or you say, regardless of what else you do, you
can't call yourself green. LEED does this with smoking. You run into
the problem of buildings like 4 Times Square, which by just about any
other "benchmark" is a green building--it's highly energy efficient,
CO2 monitors, building integrated photovoltaics (in New York City!)
lots of air changes, green materials, construction waste management,
in-fill development near mass transit etc. But, it's not going to get
LEED rated because it allows smoking. Is it a "green" building? I
would bet that many people would think so, but not according to LEED.
Having said this I believe that efforts to bring some objectivity and
lay out the risks and benefits across media of different design and
construction choices is very valuable and needs to happen. In fact
without pioneers like Hal Levin or Ray Cole, it would not be happening
at all. But I also think that we can go a long way to moving the
market toward accepting by having systems such as LEED that state, in
this (hopefully) credible source's opinion, this building meets the
current (emphasis on that last word) definition of what's "green"
sorry for the screed
Rob Watson
Natural Resources Defense Council
1200 New York Ave. NW Suite 400
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 289-6868 gen
(202) 289-1060 fax
(202) 289-2364 dir
email: rwatson@nrdc.org
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