We manufacture sealant that we package in a 5 gallon plastic pail made from Type 2 HPDE and additives that make it Biodegradable. The pail will degrade in 120 days in the landfill. It reacts to the methane. The pail is recyclable but is not made of recycled plastic. What LEED v3, v4 Credits can our customers claim or contribute to. The pail is approximately 5% by weight of the total weight of the packaged sealant. Is their a formula to plug the 5%?
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April 2, 2018 - 1:31 pm
GG - While your efforts are laudable and make sense for landfilled waste, a biodegradable pail does not fit into LEED (2009 or v4).
If the pail is recycled and diverted from the landfill, its weight or volume could contribute to waste diversion calculations MRc2 in LEED 2009 (v3) or MR Credit Construction and Demolition Waste Management in LEED v4. Yet this would require teams to actually recycle the pails, and I assume that not many markets would offer plastic recycling - but it depends on what type of plastic the pail is made of. And since these waste diversion calculations are based on weight or volume, you'd have to have a lot of these pails to really make a meaningful contribution (as compared to other heavier or more voluminous materials).
Regarding your question about 5% by weight, I think you may have been referring assembly calculation that was in the LEED 2009 credit MRc4: Recycled Content credit - https://leeduser.buildinggreen.com/credit/NC-2009/MRc4. The assembly calculation is not applicable to the scenario you described as it is based on a product that is made up of other materials (like concrete or a composite wood panel), and each recycled content material in the product contributes by weight to the overall assembly recycled content.