We're currently working on a multi-tenant building with multiple restaurants as tenants. Cleaning practices for these restaurants and their kitchens need to not only comply with local codes and regulations, but also be able to remove heavily greasy substances, stains and wet wastes. The measures required to achieve these criteria may or may not be compliant with LEED requirements, and often call for less environment-friendly products than Green Seal. Are kitchen areas necessary to be included in the IEQc3.1 cleaning program and IEQc3.3 calculations if we are to pursue the credits?
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Jason Franken
Sustainability ProfessionalLEEDuser Expert
608 thumbs up
December 19, 2010 - 11:19 pm
If you are including those tenant spaces in your overall gross floor area addressed by your LEED application, then those spaces must comply with any relevant credit requirements. Now, there are some caveats to that statement:
1) for IEQc3.3 - if you can reach the compliance threshold despite the fact that some of the cleaning products used in those areas do not currently comply, that is acceptable.
2) for IEQp3 and IEQc3.1 - if those restaurant tenants are unwilling to participate in the LEED process, and make up less than 10% of the gross floor area of the project building, you are allowed to exclude them from your LEED application. You'll need to provide documentation upon request to describe the size and nature of excluded spaces, and you must be consistent (meaning you can't exclude them only for certain credits where they'll hurt the overall effort).
That being said, the majority of conventional cleaners that customers are used to using now have green counterparts on the market that perform just as well. It may be worthwhile for your restaurant tenants to make a call to the Green Seal headquarters or their custodial vendor to see if they can suggest sustainable alternatives.