CHAPTER 3 LEED AND GREEN BUILDING ASSESSMENTINTRODUCTION
During what could be called the ‘early’ green buildings movement in the U.S., that isgreen buildings designed prior to 1999, buildings were conceptualized by architects andengineers, each design team using their individual interpretations of what could beconstrued as ‘green’ with respect to the built environment. Although it was understoodthat these buildings would be resource efficient and environmentally friendly, there wereno specific criteria that meant a design passed or failed the test of being green. With theadvent of the LEED
TM
Green Building Rating System in 1999, this situation changeddramatically with the introduction of a set of criteria that determined not only whether or not the building was green, but what specific shade of green it was. LEED
TM
is aregistered trademark of the USGBC and provides a rating system with four gradations of points that provide (from highest to lowest) Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Certified ratings.The generic label for LEED
TM
and other similar systems and standards in other countriesis
building assessment system
. There are a number of other building assessment systemsused in other countries. BREEAM (Building Research Establishment EnvironmentalAssessment Method) is a building assessment system used in the United Kingdom andCASBEE (Comprehensive Assessment System for Building Environmental Efficiency) isa building assessment approach created for Japanese construction that is under development by the Japan Sustainable Building Consortium.A building assessment system provides a methodology for scoring or rating a building’senvironmental effects, resource consumption, and health impacts. Clearly this can be avery complicated process because each of these effects has different units of measurements and affects different physical areas. Environmental effects have a widevariety of scales: local, regional, national, and global. Resource impacts are measured ina variety of units: mass, energy, volume, parts per million (ppm), density, and area.Building health can be determined only indirectly by how little chemical and biologicalmaterials are likely to be in the air circulating in the building and by the relative healthand well-being of the occupants. Portraying this wide variety of information in aninformative way is difficult enough but comparing the arrays of data for various buildingchoices is even more complicated. Attaching a rating to the array of information is alsonot an easy task.Why consider a building assessment standard or rating at all? In general, buildingassessment systems are created for the purpose of promoting high performance buildingsand some, like LEED, are specifically designed to use the market to increase demand.Building assessment systems generally offer a label or plaque indicating the rating the building achieved and it can be affixed to the building as a public statement of the building’s performance. A good rating by a building assessment system should make the building more valuable in the marketplace because it indicates the building will have lowoperational costs and a healthy interior environment. Competition by owners anddevelopers to achieve high building assessment ratings would have the effect of creatinga high quality, high performance building stock. A parallel effect is the success of building assessment systems could also help achieve otherwise difficult to reach political
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