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LEED-EB Revision Open for Public Comments

After several years of work, the US Green Building Council has just opened its proposed revisions of LEED for Existing Buildings for public comment. This is especially important for a few reasons. First, LEED is without a doubt becoming the de facto national standard and interestingly enough, the revision comes as the Council just announced that its membership passed 10,000 organizations. And secondly, LEED will not be revised again for a couple of years. Thus this is our big chance and cleaning has clearly come out as one of the “winners”.

So please review the documents (web links are below) and tell the Council what you think. I for one believe that while the revision is not perfect, we have made some important changes and it is another very good step along our journey.

Some of the important potential changes include:

• Changing the name to LEED for High Performance Operations to help the thousands of architects who are active in the Council to understand that this document is for operations & maintenance, and not for doing a major renovation on an existing building.

• Making Green Cleaning a prerequisite. While this requires just a basic plan, nonetheless Green Cleaning is now required of every green building and there are still plenty of credits to reward effort and encourage innovation.

• Adding a credit potentially worth 2 points for conducting a custodial effectiveness audit. This is our first effort to identify “effective” cleaning and to recognize that using green products is only the beginning of the journey and to encourage more effective cleaning as the means to truly achieve a high performing building.

• Increasing the focus on health by for example rewarding the development of an effective hand hygiene program and the use of more effective equipment.

• Offering additional compliance paths. For example, we have added the Environmental Choice Standards that are comparable to Green Seal.

• Encouraging product innovation, such as expanding the janitorial paper credit to include the option of products made from tree-free fibers and those made from trees that are rapidly regrowable (as compare to only using recycled content) and the use of microfiber products.

Anyone can comment on the draft rating system, but the comment period end on Friday, August 31. USGBC will respond to all comments, and post the comments and responses (without commenter names or organizations) to the USGBC Web site. If changes are made to the draft, a second public comment period will be conducted on those changes. The resulting draft will then be sent to the USGBC membership for balloting.

You can visit the public comment page for more information and to participate. (Note that a site user profile is required to submit comments. If you have not already created a profile on the USGBC Web site, you will be prompted to create one on the log in page.) For more information, you can contact leedinfo@usgbc.org with any questions or see LEED Development and Balloting Process or LEED for Existing Buildings.

Take care and remember, collectively we really can make an important contribution to protecting health and reducing negative impacts on our environment.

Steve

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