EBOM-2009 MRc1: Sustainable Purchasing—Ongoing Consumables 1 point

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Intent

To reduce the environmental and air quality impacts of the materials acquired for use in the operations and maintenance of buildings.

Requirements

Maintain a sustainable purchasing program covering materials with a low cost per unit that are regularly used and replaced through the course of business. These materials include at a minimum, paper (printing or copy paper, notebooks, notepads, envelopes), toner cartridges, binders, batteries and desk accessories. Food and beverages are excluded from this credit but are covered under MR Credit 5. Sustainable Purchasing - Food. For materials that may be considered either ongoing consumables or durable goods (see MR Credits 2.1 and 2.2), the project team is free to decide which category to put them in as long as consistency is maintained with MR Credits 2.1 and 2.2, with no contradictions, exclusions or double-counting. Consistency must also be maintained with MR Credit 7.

A template calculator for MR c1 is available in LEED Online 3 as a credit submittal. One point is awarded to projects that achieve sustainable purchases of at least 60%, of total purchases (by cost) during the performance period. Sustainable purchases are those that meet one or more of the following criteria:

• Purchases contain at least 10% postconsumer and/or 20% postindustrial material.
• Purchases contain at least 50% rapidly renewable materials.
• Purchases contain at least 50% materials harvested and processed or extracted and processed within a 500 mile (800 kilometer) radius of the project. Building materials or products shipped by rail or water have been extracted, harvested or recovered, as well as manufactured within a 500 mile (800 kilometer) total travel distance of the project site using a weighted average determined through the following formula:
  (Distance by rail/3) + (Distance by inland waterway/2) + (Distance by sea/15) + (Distance by all other means) ≤ 500 miles [800 kilometers]
• Purchases consist of at least 50% Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)–certified paper products.
• Batteries are rechargeable.

Each purchase can receive credit for each sustainable criterion met (i.e., a $100 purchase that contains both 10% postconsumer recycled content and 50% of content harvested within 500 miles of the project counts twice in the calculation, for a total of $200 of sustainable purchasing).

Ongoing consumables must be purchased during the performance period to earn points in this credit.

What does it cost?

Cost estimates for this credit

On each BD+C v4 credit, LEEDuser offers the wisdom of a team of architects, engineers, cost estimators, and LEED experts with hundreds of LEED projects between then. They analyzed the sustainable design strategies associated with each LEED credit, but also to assign actual costs to those strategies.

Our tab contains overall cost guidance, notes on what “soft costs” to expect, and a strategy-by-strategy breakdown of what to consider and what it might cost, in percentage premiums, actual costs, or both.

This information is also available in a full PDF download in The Cost of LEED v4 report.

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