3 LEED projects sitting on a parking & retail layer cake

Susan - You post some good questions! I don't know of an officially-sanctioned way. My first thought was an LI (ID #10265 - http://www.usgbc.org/leed-interpretations?keys=10265) related to MRc2 and using a gross floor area weighted average. Interestingly that LI says it is applicable to MRc4 for Core and Shell projects. Maybe this could be used a basis for precedent?

It wouldn't be fair to not get to count these valuable materials. So, unless another LEEDuser has any ideas, I'd suggest you propose a methodology to GBCI (since you've already talked to them about your complex project) and see if you can get it sanctioned. (And of course, let us know the outcome!)

Could you align the concrete pour and the steel erection with the division of materials by building? You'd have a monthly report in terms of the pay app for materials and the Architect should be there at least bimonthly and could photograph to confirm. If they did steel erection for one tower before moving onto tower two, you could capture that easily. The harder ones are when all three are under construction equally.

What if you took a MRc1 approach to dividing up the materials? A Revit model would make that easier. This may be an approach the GBCI would be more familiar with as the pilot credit for LCA used a similar approach.

I agree with Susan. Your contractor should be able to break out costs geographically by construction sequence. This is especially true of large projects with big-ticket rebar, concrete, and steel purchases. Most contracts that I have worked with have REQUIRED contractors to break down major items on their Schedules of Value into smaller, verifiable, units of work, often tied closely to the construction timeline. If it’s not too late, I’d make this a contract requirement.

Perhaps the bigger question is, why use the Master Site approach? If construction is concurrent and if each building pursues the same set of credits under the same Rating System, a Group Certification might be more appropriate. In a Group, the MR Credits are documented for the whole project, not building-by-building.

Hello, I have a similar situation where we will have a Master Site with 2 NC Projects. Has anyone found a clarification about how to prorate/allocate the site development materials across the MR Credits? - thank you!

Robin—As you probably know, the LEED Campus Guidance requires Master Site project teams to divide up the site and define a separate LEED Boundary for each separate project within the campus. The Campus Guidance then requires each “sub-project” to document the MR credits separately. Therefore, you must report the costs and sustainable characteristics of the materials within each boundary separately from one another in such a way that each cost tally includes ONLY those materials installed inside each respective boundary.

Like Michelle and Susan above, I know of no USGBC/GBCI-sanctioned way of estimating or prorating the breakdown, either by building area or by site area. (Imagine, if one site was mostly paved and the other was mostly planted, a weighted average would allocate plants to the paved site and paving to the planted site.)

The appropriate approach is to clearly delineate each LEED boundary on the site development drawings and work with your project specifiers, contract administrators, and construction managers to write provisions into the contract documents that REQUIRE the contractor(s) and subcontractors to report material costs separately for each site. This will provide the separate cost tallies required by the Campus Guidance, and it only requires slightly more effort than providing single line items for the entire Master Site. It would certainly be easier (and more defensible) than trying to estimate after-the-fact how much of each material went where.

This makes complete sense to me; thank you!!