Cooling Water and Food Waste Water

Janice, it's often said in LEED, "not all credits are appliable to all projects." In some cases this can seem particularly unfair. But so it goes—it's a single system meant to apply to an infinite variety of buildings.But that's just a philosophical take on it. As for this specific credit, I am not familiar with its development.

I got this additional feedback from USGBC. In addition to the philosophical note that I gave, they said:These two issues are common, or were in 2004, in hospital designs. LEED for Healthcare was designed with a 24/7 hospital as the prototypical project. Energy efficiency for using an air-cooled chiller will be reflected in Optimize Energy Performance.

For 4.2, we added the language about evaporative condensers via addenda 10/18/12 as part of our approach to make LEED more global. Air-cooled systems are more common outside of the U.S., though are generally less efficient and the added language was intended to act as a backstop.

For 4.3, we do award projects the point if they do not have food waste disposer systems or pulpers. It’s something we accounted for in the form.