LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance (O+M) is designed to make pretty good buildings even better. But O+M has never really gone after low-performing buildings.

This quarter’s LEED Addenda were released by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) on April 21, 2023.   

The one-liner: no major changes, but LEED for Homes projects should review the new interpretations and international tips.  

How do you like reinventing the wheel?

In the green building world, there are dozens of strategies and approaches that have to be figured out project by project, team by team, over and over again. 

Sometimes this makes sense: every building is different.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s time to bring LEED v4—first released a decade ago and still very much in use—up to speed on current code expectations for energy performance. Proposed new metrics for the Optimize Energy Performance credit would also require project teams to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from operations in tandem with reductions in energy consumption.

When LEED v4 first arrived on the scene in 2013, it newly incentivized whole-building life-cycle assessment (WBLCA) that could demonstrate significant reductions in the project’s carbon footprint.

This quarter’s LEED Addenda were released on Wednesday, February 8. USGBC posted the official update here.   Our hot take is…. 

As embodied carbon gains more attention, more project teams are pursuing the Building Life-Cycle Impact Reduction credit in LEED v4.0 and v4.1 and choosing option 4, Whole-Building Life-Cycle Assessment. If you are in that boat but wondering where to start, we would like to offer a simple equation.

To conduct a whole-building life-cycle assessment (WBLCA), you need two pieces of information: the quantity of each material and the embodied environmental factor for that material.

Quantity of material x Environmental factor = Embodied environmental impact

When it comes to sustainability, modular carpet is a surprisingly complicated product. It’s made with a range of different backings and face fibers and various other compounds that might be added as filler, surface treatments, antimicrobials, and more. Setting a bar that optimizes for climate, health, and circularity is challenging.

It’s been more than two years since EDI (short for equity, diversity, and inclusion) has become a trend and buzz word, and many organizations have issued a statement to address the EDI challenges within their industries. But through LEED, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has been pioneering social equity in many ways for more than a decade.

NOTE: We closed comments on this post because the public comment period ended January 13, 2023.

Public comment drafts of the Minimum Energy Performance prerequisite and Optimize Energy Performance credit under v4 BD+C and ID+C are now available on the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) website. The Annual Energy Use credit under BD+C Homes: Multifamily Midrise is also included.

I’m just home from Greenbuild 2022 in San Francisco. I’ve never felt such a palpable sense of urgency—some might say rising panic—at Greenbuild regarding the scale of the challenges before us as an industry when it comes to decarbonization, social justice, and climate adaptation.

LEED v5 is out to make up for lost time (oh, so much lost time) in that regard, and nowhere is that more evident than in changes taking shape for existing buildings.

Everyone loves a crosswalk. It can help you get safely across tricky territory. But sometimes you have to ask … why is this territory so tricky in the first place?

I’m not actually talking about pedestrians navigating busy roadways right now, even though that’s a topic I’m passionate about. I’m talking about competing certifications, codes, and other frameworks that never seem to fit quite neatly together—a situation that can force hard choices, add totally unnecessary costs, and jeopardize achievement of green building targets.

LEED v5 development is ramping up, and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is going to need your help to make it happen.

“LEED projects have a very long tail,” said a U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) official, explaining why the organization will be introducing greater stringency for energy performance prerequisites and credits under LEED v4.

In other words, new construction projects registering today likely won’t get built for a long time and will continue to “exist for many years” after the current version of the rating system has closed. That’s according to Corey Enck, vice president for LEED technical development, who was speaking at a Greenbuild San Francisco session on the future of LEED.

We’ve known for a long time that the LEED rating systems, though they’ve had a tremendous impact on the global building industry, can’t move the needle fast enough to prevent the most catastrophic climate change impacts.

One thing we really need is a framework that focuses on decarbonizing existing buildings at the portfolio scale. Turns out we’re going to get it.