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Global +

LEED, found in 140+ countries, is the most widely used green building rating system in the world.

As it continues to scale internationally, USGBC is continually developing resources and building out support to ensure that LEED can be applied in any geographic area, and also keeping tabs on areas of growth. 

Take a look at which countries outside of the United States have the largest LEED presence, ranked by millions of gross square meters (GSM) of LEED-certified project space.

GROSS SQUARE METERS (GSM) ARE REPORTED IN MILLIONS.

* Total includes certified and registered projects. 

** India’s numbers are current as of October 2013.

Sustainable Materials +

Like plants growing toward sunlight, designers are reaching for a way to illuminate the unseen health hazards and environmental footprint of building materials.

By Nadav Malin.

I

n 2013, 30 major architecture firms sent letters to all their material suppliers demanding transparency. 

- “We need to know what’s in the products we’re specifying,” claims Russell Perry, FAIA, director of SmithGroupJJR Washington, D.C. office. 

- “Our clients have a right to know these things and I’d like to help them find out,” he adds.

As a board member of the newly formed Health Product Declaration Collaborative, Perry was impressed by a letter sent out by the Dallas-based firm HKS, so he called on sustainable design leaders from other architecture firms to write similar letters, threatening to eventually ban products without content disclosures from their material libraries and educational programs.

After joining Perry’s letter-writing campaign, Rand Ekman of Cannon Design in Chicago heard from suppliers who needed help understanding what was behind this new demand and how exactly they should comply. 

In response, Ekman invited manufacturers to meet with designers from his firm and others for 

- “an open conversation about how manufacturing and design professionals can partner in this endeavor.” 

The face-to-face meetings created a lot of good will by demystifying the content disclosure process and revealing ways manufacturers could be supported while making the changes needed to comply. 

Inspired by Ekman’s success, other firms replicated that model in Washington, Dallas, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

It wasn't only demand from large firms that motivated product manufacturers to divulge the make-up of their products, however. 

Public comment drafts of LEED v4 beginning early in 2012 included a new credit encouraging the disclosure of a product’s chemical constituents and health hazards.

When the new credit was formally adopted as part of LEED v4 in November 2013, USGBC put some additional muscle behind the burgeoning transparency campaign.

*Deep Roots;

The push for transparency in building products has a deep-rooted history. 

Its origins can be traced back to a number of sources, including:

1. The seminal cradle-to-cradle framework developed by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart. 

cradle-to-cradle calls for all materials to be recyclable endlessly, either through composting as 

- “biological nutrients” 

or in industry as 

- “technical nutrients.” 

This goal requires the elimination of toxic substances from both nutrient cycles.

2. Hazard-avoidance credits in the Green Guide for Healthcare, which were subsequently adopted into LEED in a modified form. 

These credits focus primarily on mercury and other heavy metals.

3. The proliferation of ingredient 

- “red lists” 

or substances to be avoided within specific programs. 

The best known example is the Living Building Challenge red list, which most project teams find to be the most demanding requirement of the very rigorous program. 

The design firm Perkins + Will has also been a leader in this area, posting its 

- “Precautionary List” 

of substances that are to be avoided if possible (transparency.perkinswill.com). The shift from a list of banned ingredients to wholesale disclosure of what a product is made of is welcomed by leading manufacturers because it provides them with an opportunity to engage their customer in a more collaborative conversation about product choices.

4. Demand from a few influential companies, most notably Google, that directed designers working on their projects to find out what’s in the products they’re specifying and eliminate certain substances.

5. The experience of product researchers at my own firm, BuildingGreen, who struggled for years to obtain the information needed to factor health and ecological toxicity concerns in our GreenSpec screening. 

This frustration led us to collaborate with the nonprofit Healthy Building Network to create the Health Product Declaration Open Standard.

More than Ingredients;

Transparency isn't just about ingredients—it’s also about the environmental footprint of a product in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, and resource depletion. 

For many years now, some companies have been using environmental life-cycle assessment (LCA) to inform their product development efforts, but until we have consistent rules for what to include in the scope of those LCAs and how to report the results, it’s not possible to compare products on that basis.

The environmental product declaration (EPD) format aims to address those problems by providing a consistent reporting framework for life-cycle assessments that are completed in conformance with standard product category rules, so all products are measured using the same assumptions. 

The new LEED v4 rating system introduces a new credit for products that come with EPDs.

In Europe, government agencies help manage the environmental product declaration rules, ensuring that there is only one set of rules for each product category. 

There is no similar government function in North America; however, some competing sets of product category rules have started to emerge, which defeats the goal of creating a level playing field. 

In partnership with UL Environment, USGBC has stepped in to identify the most robust and consistent rules and to endorse the EPDs that comply with those rules. 

While some industry players—especially those who backed alternative category rules—are unhappy about USGBC picking winners in this way, it does help prevent chaos in the marketplace.

Choking on Alphabet Soup;

The alphabet soup of new reporting formats is not easy, even for the most dedicated specifier, much less designers and contractors with many other priorities. And each new label or declaration represents added paperwork for manufacturers, who are already overwhelmed by the load: 

- “When I hire a person now, it’s for documentation—it’s not to make the product better. That’s a travesty,” 

says Steven Kooy, global sustainability manager for the office furniture company Haworth.

To avoid scaring off mainstream designers and contractors, the industry must move quickly toward a single, integrated product declaration format that includes content from EPDs, HPDs, as well as information on the impacts of resources extraction and habitat disruption, which are much harder to measure and thus not captured effectively by current reporting mechanisms.

Such an integrated label could, in theory, also incorporate metrics on the social fairness of product. Of mainstream North American players, only the International Living Future Institute has tried to tackle that aspect of a product’s impacts with its 

- “Just” 

label.

Transparency Everywhere;

The building industry is not alone in moving toward being transparent about the make-up of its products. 

There are parallel initiatives in automotive and electronics—although most of these programs provide information within the supply chain, stopping short of the end user.

No doubt, barriers do still remain. 

There are still real and perceived concerns about divulging trade secrets and potential liability that comes with more awareness about hazards in the products we sell, specify, and install. 

However, these obstacles are no threat to the momentum that has been created.

Keeping specifiers in the dark about potential health and environmental impacts is no longer the acceptable default. 

- "By letting the sun shine on what’s truly inside the products we use, we'll all be better off".

Green Economy +

By Mary Grauerholz.

Bank of America offers first corporate green bond in U.S.

The first corporate “green” bond in the country is doing more than helping to create a more sustainable future—it is pleasing its investors. 

Bank of America Corporation introduced the bond based on a public financial commitment to the environment, and to answer the calls of investors who wanted more socially conscious investment choices. 

The resulting projects—think ecological construction, geothermal energy, lighting retrofits in public buildings, and more—are pleasing investors with a vision of a more sustainable world and good financial returns.

Bank of America introduced the three-year fixed-rate bond, with $500 million in aggregate principal, in fall 2013. 

It was years in the making, says Suzanne Buchta, Global Co-head of Green Debt Capital Markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, from the company’s Manhattan office. 

It was a natural evolution for the institution, she says, springing from a long-term financial commitment to build a portfolio of socially conscious investments.

The bond will help finance certain assets that are included in a 10-year $50 billion green business initiative that Bank of America rolled out in 2012 to address climate change, reduce demands on natural resources, and advance lower-carbon economic solutions.

The first conversation about the bond was in 2011, Buchta says, when her team was working on green bonds for the World Bank. As she says, 

- “We got to thinking about one for our own bank.” 

Many other institutions had had the same idea, but as Buchta says, 

- “For us, it was sitting down and doing the work that was necessary.”

Several months of work followed, from determining which projects to invest in to targeting the investor base.

The bond sharpens Bank of America’s profile as a leader in capital markets, Buchta says. Among the investors are TIAA-CREF, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, and BlackRock. 

- “There was also strong demand, so we were able to attract good financing levels,”

she says. 

- “It was demand-driven.” 

Another goal was to reach new investors, and that has been a big success; approximately 10 percent of total investors are newcomers to the institution’s market.  

Buchta has long nurtured an interest in environmental construction and was accredited as a LEED Green Associate several years ago. 

Her Manhattan office building, in fact, was the first LEED Platinum Core and Shell building in New York City. 

The timing of the introduction of the green bond was perfect for her, she says. 

- “I was getting very passionate about environmental initiatives.” 

The funds will be used to finance energy-efficient projects that feature renewable energy in solar, wind, and geothermal. 

The projects stretch from coast to coast, ranging from energy-saving lighting retrofits in government buildings, to heating and cooling in public housing and new insulation in public schools.

One $16 million project in California is providing funds to finance the conversion of 30,000 high-pressure sodium cobra head streetlights to Light-Emitting-Diode (LED) streetlights in Oakland, one of the first municipalities in the country to implement big-scale street lighting LED conversion. 

The project is expected to bring a bundle of benefits, including energy savings, greater functionality, more jobs, and even less crime, brought about by the benefits of better visibility on city streets.

The environmental impact of the green bond is obvious through this California project. Clearly, it is also a good business decision. 

The bond was over-subscribed, with potential investors outweighing supply, says Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesperson in the company’s Charlotte, N.C., office. 

- “We had a pretty broad base of investors who wanted to participate in the offering,” 

he says. 

- “Generally speaking, it appears there is more interest in environmentally friendly [investments] today. This bond is supportive of that.”

The bond is part of a larger commitment that Bank of America has to the environment, the 10-year business initiative. 

“When we announced that we would invest $50 billion in climate change and lower carbon economic solutions, we basically put a flag in the ground,” 

Dubrowski says.

- “This $500 million green bond offering is complementary to that commitment.”

Philosophically, the green bond has recharged Bank of America Corporation staff. 

- “It was something new to think about,” Buchta says. “It’s a project that people are proud to be a part of.” 

- "The resulting projects of the green bond are pleasing investors with its vision of a more sustainable world and good financial returns".

Human Health +

Preventive Medicine

2014 May-June, LEED impact

A discussion with HOK’s Henry Chao on what makes a healthy building.

By Jeff Harder

Healthcare in the United States is undergoing major changes, with the underpinnings of the system shifting away from simply treating incidents of illness toward promoting overall health and well-being, and for architects like Henry Chao, design principal for the global healthcare practice at the international firm HOK, this shift provides an opportunity to create hospitals and facilities that contribute to this broader purpose.

Chao’s most notable projects have included the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Expansion in Columbus, Ohio; the Cleveland Clinic Miller Pavilion in Cleveland, Ohio; Kuwait University College of Science in Kuwait; and Ng Teng Feng (Jurong) General Hospital in Singapore. Here, he speaks about subtle design decisions that change perceptions of illness for the better, the parallels between planning hospitals and planning cities, and LEED’s role in fostering a 21st-century sense of what it means to be healthy.

No one would ever make a fuss if someone was going to a city library. 

No one would make a fuss if someone was just going to the neighborhood park. 

If you heard that someone went to the hospital, why should that be a big deal? It shouldn’t be. And [we need] to make sure it isn’t.

A hospital by itself can easily have 12 to 16 different individual departments. 

Each department has five or six different sections, and healthcare architects need to understand what they do, how they do it, how they relate to each other, how they connect with each other. It is an incredibly functional constraint. The beauty of a hospital is that the architect needs to take the essence of medicine, take the essence of healing, and the essence of science, interpret it, adopt it, express it in a way that it can communicate with its surrounding in a reciprocal manner… it is a two-way dialogue.

Each hospital needs to speak about health in a manner that the community can accept and understand.

If you think about the inside of a hospital, a floor plan can be [the same size as] one or two football fields. 

There’s the circulation, the wayfinding—people always talk about hospital wayfinding being bad and I don't blame them, because it’s such a complex environment. 

With each block and each department, it’s like a mini-city. 

I've found that a lot of times, between a hospital space planner and a city planner, there’s a lot of similarity in terms of the amount of information that has to be juggled, balanced, and negotiated. 

Basically, it takes a designer who is not afraid of a lot of data to tackle a building like a hospital.

After I joined HOK, one of my larger projects was at Ohio State [the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Expansion], where we're dealing with a 1.2-million-square-foot cancer center, with the vision not to treat cancer patients as though they have done something wrong or made a mistake, but to treat cancer as just part of a stage of life, and in fact, that’s what it is. 

That notion coincides with a major shift in the healthcare environment—and I want to take away the word 

- “care”

— the health environment in the United States that’s happening right now. 

We're trying to switch from a solely episodic disease treatment health system into preventive and health maintenance and a healthy living society. 

That’s a tremendous thing, and we as architects have a tremendous opportunity to contribute.

When I was a young architect, the first thing I ever learned about cancer center design is that we need a separate doorway in and out for cancer patients. For years, in healthcare architecture for cancer centers, it was always a separate door. 

Not only a separate door, but separate parking, separate everything—you don't want to embarrass these people right? But Ohio State thought that when you have a separate door, you're actually stigmatizing [cancer patients]. 

As if they're so different—almost like, 

- “I have cancer—I can't even go through the front door. I have cancer—I look so bad that I have to be hidden from public view.” 

So Ohio State said no to that. 

They actually put very simple, convenient parking access for everyone. 

They put a waiting lounge for the people to have a little privacy, but it’s the same entry, everybody comes in and goes out in the same place, and that actually inspired me. 

When I was growing up, I didn't understand so-called preventive care. 

I didn't go see my dentist, didn't get an annual check-up. But my daughter, growing up in this society, knows she needs to go see her dentist every so often to make sure her teeth are good, go to her annual checkup to make sure her health is good, and she takes the responsibility to do that. 

I think that’s great. 

I think this generation is going to fundamentally change how we perceive health and healthcare. And they'll understand that getting proper health care is our civic right, and keeping proper health is our civic obligation. 

In the so-called care environment, whether it’s a hospital or a clinic, now it’s taking on a fundamental shift in identity: the big white elephants, the big grey buildings that sit in the community now need to be seamlessly linked, connected, weaved into the fabric of community life on a daily basis.

At Ohio State, the chemotherapy center has great views of open spaces. 

We created a family and conversation area because a lot of times, when one person gets sick, it’s like their entire family gets sick. 

Having those conversations becomes important. 

So when the patient and family want to connect with each other, we don't isolate them. I actually thought that was a tremendous breakthrough. 

The building will probably be completed by this fall, I think, and I can't wait.

I see LEED as a means to an ultimate objective.

LEED is never the objective [itself]. The ultimate objective is a healthy environment.

Even saying a healthy environment is very limiting—I’d say LEED’s objective is to be responsive and responsible in an environment—responsible behavior, responsible architecture. 

Health just happens to be part of it. 

My feeling is that LEED has been a very effective tool: it’s become a mechanism that is to a great extent measurable, and it’s in the marketplace. 

If our client wants to have that recognition, that becomes an incentive to push our industry to move toward responsible architecture and responsible design, and I think that’s wonderful.

Healthcare facilities deal with the most traumatic moments of people’s lives: when you're born, when you're sick, and when you're actually leaving the world. 

It’s an emotion-filled environment, but by doing work for a healthcare facility, when you sit down across the table from the health care providers — the doctors and nurses—you are talking to a group of very smart, well-educated, well-read people. 

When I sit down with them, the conversation is always about how I can make an environment the most conducive to better their practice—which is, in general, saving people’s lives. 

That is absolutely fascinating to me.

To be a healthy person, you need to be in a healthy environment, and a healthy building is just part of it.