Lauren, thanks for your comments above on the 20% adoption criteria. That said, it still seems that achieving and documenting anything less than complete adoption quickly gets into a big grey area. Let’s say my landscape crew is using some equipment that is low-impact and some that is not. To meet the 20% min criteria, do I consider every piece of equipment the crew uses? Do rakes, brooms, shovels and manual clippers all count toward low impact, while the gas-powered blower does not? Do I count up all the equipment in their vehicle to show that more than 20% of it satisfies the criteria?
The ref manual lists “maintenance equipment” as one of the five operational elements to consider in the plan. But other vendors use equipment besides the landscape crew. Do I evaluate each vendor individually to ensure they meet the 20% criteria or do I aggregate them? Landscape vendor: 5 pieces yes, 1 no; Building exterior cleaner: 1 piece yes, 3 no; and so on? Could one vendor, not meeting the 20% min for maintenance equipment, throw the whole effort into the bin? Or could the good work of my landscape crew make up for the fact that the building exterior cleaner is just plain dirty?
Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11477 thumbs up
May 5, 2010 - 9:57 am
Although the credit language and some of the discussion around this credit references equipment, I think the key point to answer your question, Matt, is that it's really about "best management practices," in the words of the credit language.Even in places where the credit requirements suggest a focus on equipment or certain products or chemicals, it's doing this as a proxy for the extent to which those products were implemented in practice.Focus on the percentage of time or instances that best practices were implemented. Use equipment or product inventories as a way to gauge that, but not as a substitute. I would agree with you that documenting a specific percentage improvement is tricky, and that complete compliance would be a good goal, or at least complying beyond 20%, and by a big threshold, to remove issues of vagueness or error.
Rachael McClain
113 thumbs up
June 28, 2010 - 12:17 pm
Could you explain how to use the performance metric for the maintenance equipment. It would be helpful if you could give an example. Thank you.