Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) governs the LEED rating systems which it describes as a “voluntary, consensus-based, market-driven program that provides third-party verification of green buildings.”

Now 13 years old, the LEED rating systems have been used to certify projects in 135 countries. LEED rating systems can be applied to a variety of building project types including home construction, commercial buildings, existing building operations and maintenance, community development and more. The program offers certifications at four levels (certified, silver, gold, or platinum) depending on how many rating “points” the project earns.

The specific green building requirements vary depending on the rating system a project applies under, but the main categories in which projects can earn credit towards certification include: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality. Projects can also earn bonus credits for particularly innovative techniques, or for addressing environmental issues specific to their location.

LEED is frequently updated based on continued research and input from USGBC staff and volunteer committees. LEED Version 4 is next up and according to USGBC, is anticipated to include changes like new market sectors (for example, data centers), increased technical rigor (for example, life cycle analysis of materials), and streamlined services including an improved LEED Online platform for applicants.

Living Building Challenge

A relative newcomer, the Living Building Challenge was launched in 2006 as a standard available to the public. The Living Building Institute (LBI) was founded to administer the challenge and certified its first projects in 2010. The LBI describes the challenge as “the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard. It calls for the creation of building projects at all scales that operate as cleanly, beautifully and efficiently as nature’s architecture.”

The program offers three levels of certification (petals, net zero energy, or full certification). The challenge takes seven building performance categories into account including: site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty. Projects must be operational for 12 months prior to being evaluated for certification so that the certification can be based on actual performance. The challenge includes 20 requirements, most striking of which include the requirement that the project be energy and water self-sufficient.

Example – Green Roof Anacostia Gateway courtesy of GarberDC via flickr creative commons.

As the New York Times reported this week, the Bullitt Center in Seattle claims that it will be the greenest commercial building in the world when it officially opens on April 22, 2013. The project is seeking Living Building Challenge certification and includes water-related features like a green roof, composting toilets, grey-water treatment, permeable pavement and green stormwater infrastructure, all in the name of protecting nearby Puget Sound. The building will use solar arrays to generate as much power as it uses, with strict metering for tenants.

While every green building rating system has its critics and proponents, these two seem to be continually raising the bar in building performance. Considering that buildings can take a significant portion of a country’s resources (39% of U.S. energy use goes to buildings (PDF)) and that there is a growing/modernizing world population, a continued effort to improve building performance will be critical to resource and environmental protection efforts in the future.

How “green” is your home or office? Have you ever worked with a green building rating system? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons!

By andy_5322 via flickr

There are many ways to measure the environmental footprint of a person, product or service. You may have seen calculators for determining your carbon footprint, air and water quality measures, various “green” certifications and labels, and a relatively new term in the history of environmental studies: life cycle assessments (LCA). What makes a life cycle assessment different from other measurement methods?According to the Environmental Protection Agency, an LCA is “a technique to assess the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product, process, or service.” There is no one step-by-step way to perform this type assessment but the International Organization for Standardization (the ISO, which sets international standards in many subject areas) provides a section dedicated to LCA in the ISO 14000 Environmental Management Standard for purchase. The ISO standard is not prescriptive about the specific steps of an LCA, but as described in the standard abstract, it sets the general framework needed to determine the assessment goal and scope, perform a life cycle inventory analysis, impact assessment, interpretation and reporting.An abundance of LCA examples can be found online, many in the form of academic or professional journals and many by companies taking a hard look at their products and services. For example, the National Geographic Society performed an LCA on the National Geographic Magazine in 2008-2009. This entailed looking at all parts of the magazine production process from forestry and harvest, through content creation, and ultimately waste disposal and/or recycling.  They found that a year of one National Geographic Magazine printed subscription resulted in the emission of 21.84 pounds of CO2 equivalent, like burning a gallon of gas. The bulk of the emissions came from paper production and printing processes (makes you feel pretty good reading your environmental news in blog form, right?).

Beyond product and process assessments, a trend is emerging towards social life cycle assessments, which take into account the impacts of a product or service on people and society. For either assessment, the basic idea is to account for costs to the environment and/or society when considering the impact of the overall process in scope versus only accounting for the cost of materials directly consumed for the process. These measurements take a cradle to grave look at the product or service, for those products that are ultimately disposed of as waste. Or better yet, a cradle to cradle view, if the resources can be re-born in another usable form.

If you want to learn more about LCA, here are a few resources to check out:

• The EPA links to resources, case studies, and standards
• The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment (accessible to JHU students via online library resources in SpringerLink)
• One LCA Methodology by Carnegie Mellon University