What is LEED?
Date: 10/24/23
Subject: What is LEED?
MLA/APA citation:
What Is LEED Certification? – U.S. Green Building Council, support.usgbc.org/hc/en-us/articles/4404406912403-What-is-LEED-certification-. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023.
Assessment:
One of my possible topics for my Original work may be creating a model of a platinum LEED-certified building. But what is LEED? LEED is a certification given to environmentally friendly buildings that rate how little they impact the environment. In the U.S. Green Building Council’s words, LEED is “(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the most widely used green building rating system in the world. Available for virtually all building types, LEED provides a framework for healthy, efficient, and cost-saving green buildings. LEED certification is a globally recognized symbol of sustainability achievement and leadership.” This system is supposed to promote environmentally friendly construction practices in the future and will help elevate some of the effects humans have on the environment.
The overall goal of the LEED program is to achieve “Green buildings” or buildings with “an effort to amplify the positive and mitigate the negative of these effects throughout the entire life cycle of a building.” and this is measured through its effects on the environment and the beginning and end of the buildings life cycle and how it affects all resources that are used in construction. The Green Building Council uses a general acronym to show how they rate buildings which are the three pillars of sustainability (people, planet, and prosperity) in their projects.
The actual ratings are done in a more specific way. The different rating levels are Certified (40-49 points), Silver (50-59 points), Gold (60-79 points) and Platinum (80+ points). These points can only be obtained through these:
INTEGRATIVE PROCESS 0 / 1
LOCATION AND TRANSPORTATION 0 / 16
SUSTAINABLE SITES 0 / 10
WATER EFFICIENCY 0 / 11
ENERGY & ATMOSPHERE 0 / 33
MATERIALS & RESOURCES 0 / 13
INDOOR ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY 0 / 16
INNOVATION 0 / 6
REGIONAL PRIORITY CREDITS 0 / 4
In total, 110 points are obtainable, the innovation and regional priority credits are much harder to obtain and are counted more as bonus points rather than part of the evaluation. All of the other sections are very specific and correlate back to The Green Building Council’s three pillars of sustainability, people, planet, and prosperity. This competitive nature of points and ratings creates a desire to achieve the highest score which is indirectly pushing the environmentalist agenda forward.
Overall, this project has produced an outstanding 167,087 LEED-certified buildings all over the world. If one was to check the project directory, one would notice that most LEED-certified buildings are either memorials or schools. There is a good reason for this. The most obvious is that memorials are quite simple to make and usually do not have a negative toll on the earth so they are easily certified. School on the other hand is a more interesting idea. One of the biggest reasons for schools being certified is that being certified saves money. Most environmental movements save resources which include gas, water, and electricity. These three resources are some of the most taxing expenses that schools pay for. Because LEED ideas usually save these resources, the school districts sometimes put a little extra money into their schools to make them not only environmentally friendly but also more economically friendly.