The Green Gauge: LEED The U.S. Green Building Council was formed in 1993 by developer David Godfrey, attorney Mike Italiano, and Rick Fedrizzi, then a marketing manager with United Technologies (and currently the USGBC’s president and CEO). At the time, developers were beginning to boast of constructing “green” buildings. Frustrated that no independent method existed for verifying or comparing those claims, Godfrey, Italiano, and Fedrizzi established the council in response. A few years later, the council formed a committee of sustainable building experts to come up with just such a system, which they called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. After a yearlong pilot, LEED went live in April 2000.
The voluntary system utilizes a checklist, awarding points for achieving certain environmental goals. Those objectives are split into five categories: site selection, energy and pollution, water efficiency, indoor air quality, and materials. For example, a project scores a point by reclaiming wastewater or by using recycled building materials. Applicants are required to scrupulously document their claims in order to earn points. Approved buildings are ranked on a sliding scale, depending on the total score, from “certified” to “silver” to “gold” to the highest level, “platinum.”
Initially, LEED was targeted at newly constructed office buildings. But as interest in green building grew, the USGBC expanded the system to handle other conditions in the office market. There is a version of LEED for existing buildings, meant to reward owners for upgrading building systems to achieve significant conservation goals and improvements in air quality; there’s a version for speculative office buildings, meant to reward developers for making green choices when framing out the building’s shell and its core operations; and there’s a version for commercial interiors, meant to reward tenants for making green choices in the one or more floors where they have a say over design.
LEED immediately helped stir a media frenzy around high-profile green architecture, such as the Condé Nast skyscraper in Times Square, designed by Fox & Fowle and finished in early 2000. What it didn’t immediately produce was a ton of green buildings. Even now, roughly 800 projects later, LEED’s numbers represent a minuscule fraction of the millions of buildings constructed or renovated in the United States since 2000.
Hicks doesn’t deny that the USGBC needs to improve its low batting average. But he points to other statistics that he says more accurately measure the council’s growing influence. The number of member organizations within the USGBC has grown from 500 to more than 8,000. Since 2001, more than 35,000 architects, engineers, and consultants have taken the council’s course to become accredited in LEED—and every business day, 80 more take the exam. So the language and mindset of LEED are penetrating deep into the design and construction fields, whether or not all of those people have ever worked on a certified green building.
Lately, the USGBC has been drawing competitors who want to end the perception that LEED and green building are one and the same. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) wrote its own green guidelines for housing, partly to give developers a lower-cost alternative to LEED for Homes (which is now in the pilot phase), and partly to pre-empt local governments from passing green mandates by showing that home builders already take the environment seriously. “We want something out there that’s builderfriendly, but also a good green standard,” says Emily English, NAHB’s green building program manager.
Meanwhile, a rating system called Green Globes is waging a more direct assault on LEED. Green Globes is published by the Green Building Initiative (GBI), a nonprofit based in Portland, Ore. The GBI touts Green Globes as a streamlined, web-based alternative to LEED’s onerous documentation. The other main selling point has to do with organizational process. Both LEED and Green Globes claim to have been developed using a “consensus-based” process, but only the GBI’s version has been certified by the American National Standards Institute, a well-respected third party.
Many environmentalists view Green Globes with suspicion, owing to the extensive financial support GBI receives from the vinyl, chemical, and wood industries. But Ward Hubbell, the GBI’s executive director, prefers to paint LEED as the villain—an entrenched monopoly that ignores industry concerns. Competition has been good for LEED, Hubbell argues. Shortly after the creation of Green Globes, he notes, LEED responded by launching a web-based tool for moving paperwork online.
The GBI is getting some traction of its own: Six states and a couple of federal agencies recognize Green Globes as an alternative to LEED for government buildings. But the alternative system suffered a blow last September, when the General Services Administration, the landlord of the federal government’s huge real-estate portfolio, studied competing ratings systems and called LEED “the most appropriate and credible sustainable building rating system available.” Asked about the ruling, Hubbell says only that “it didn’t help.”
“If there’s a current advantage for LEED,” Hubbell continues, “it’s that people don’t realize there are other rating systems out there. A lot of people think USGBC must be some federal agency or something, and that LEED is a federal rule.”
100,000 by 2010 On a sunny spring day in Washington, the windows of the USGBC’s offices—designed by Perkins+Will—are popped open and the HVAC system is turned off. Everywhere, small signs point to key features that made this a LEED Platinum showcase. There are the Energy Star appliances in the kitchen, lights that automatically dim with the sunshine, cork flooring in one conference room and a recycled table and chairs in another. The list goes on and on.
“Normally, when you move into a new home or office, there’s that smell there that you have to get used to,” Hicks says. “When we moved in, there was nothing. It’s because we have low-VOC paints, carpet, and ceiling tiles, so they’re not off-gassing those smells you normally get. Those are chemicals that we’re not breathing.”
This is the place where the council’s paid staff—85 and growing—administers the LEED empire. The talk around here used to be about relaunching LEED in an updated “version 3.0.” Lately, however, it seems change may be coming more incrementally. For instance, the council wants to tweak LEED by making it more attuned to regional conditions—the differences, say, between building green in the hot and dry Southwest versus the damp and cool Pacific Northwest. Staffers also want to incorporate “life-cycle analysis” of building materials into the ratings. In that scenario, a material like bamboo—long favored for its fast-growing and therefore regenerative quality— might rate worse due to the energy required to ship it here from Asia.
What occupies a lot of Hicks’ time these days is figuring out how to certify 100,000 commercial buildings in the next three years. To meet this target, the USGBC is engaging universities, banks, and other major organizations that build and manage large portfolios of property. The idea is to entrench LEED in the culture of these organizations, so that they’ll produce large quantities of environmentally sensitive construction. “This is our future,” Hicks says. “We’ll still have individual buildings to certify, but you’ll see an increased focus on working with organizations on how we can work LEED into their delivery process.”
And increasingly, LEED is going international. The USGBC helped found something called the World Building Council, an affiliation of similar organizations in 10 countries. The U.S. council encourages other countries to develop ratings systems of their own. But it has licensed LEED for use in Canada and India, and Hicks regularly fields calls from other countries that are interested in promoting green building.
“The easy thing to do is to say we’ll license LEED. But it’s really more about walking them through the journey,” says Hicks. “Our mission is not necessarily that LEED proliferates around the world, but that the movement proliferates,” he adds. “We don’t have a world-domination strategy for LEED.”
Christopher Swope is an associate editor at Governing magazine in Washington, D.C.