High Recycled Content

Barbara—I gather from your question that you represent a ceiling system manufacturer or supplier trying to meet the “requirements” specified in the Bidding Documents for various projects. The changes you have seen may reflect changes in the marketplace rather than changes to LEED. LEED has never stipulated minimum recycled content for any particular product. However, several green building resources publish guide specifications and target recommendations based on product trends. The rising thresholds that you have observed may just reflect increasing availability of more highly recycled products. You ARE right that LEEDv4 has shifted its focus toward interior materials, but maybe not the way you think. LEED has always based MR credits on material costs, and most new construction projects spend the most money on structure and shell components. In past LEED versions, many projects could earn MR credits simply by tracking big-ticket structure and shell items. Now, under LEEDv4, structure and enclosure materials may not constitute more than 30% of the value of compliant building products. LEED projects MUST track interior products in order to count the exterior ones. See the Building Product Disclosure & Optimization Calculator: http://www.usgbc.org/resources/bpdo-calculator. Also new to LEEDv4: Manufacturers can now contribute to MR Disclosure & Optimization credits through Extended Producer Responsibility, Bio-Based Materials, Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), Multi-Attribute Optimization Certificates, Corporate Sustainability Reports (CSR), Material Ingredient Reporting & Optimization, and Supply Chain Optimization. Here too, the focus is toward interior products. You should expect project Specs to start asking about these items as well.

I am surprised they collapsed the local credit requirement down so tightly. We are no longer support local materials disclosure on V4. Waste of time and effort. Additionally, USGBC never really dealt with the fact that all primaries deck their logs together, so connection to a locality is lost. What is there instead is a locus of harvest (visualize a cloud) around the mill based on reasonable hauling distances. The mill is typically the center of harvest but the harvest circle can be distorted by borders, natural features, land use. When folks insist they need to know where their wood comes from, we provide them an opportunity to purchase FSC 100% from a named track. We will deck the logs separately, incur leads times project teams rarely tolerate and there would be premium over FSC Mix to separately batch and move this fiber through without contamination from other sources. Takes time and $$$ and the markets (with China managing currency down and strong dollar) mean this option is a non starter for most project teams.