MR 5 Regional Materials

Sorry, but you cannot use the distributor’s facility, or even the lumber mill, as the extraction site for wood products. Under Credit MRc5, LEED-2009 Addenda define extraction points as the origin of the RAW MATERIAL. Here are some good rules of thumb:
. . Minerals: The mine, quarry, or well from which the material was drawn.
. . Agricultural (such as wood): The land where the material was harvested (so, for solid lumber, veneer, plywood, etc., the extraction site is the forest, not the distributor).
. . Reused: The place from which the material was salvaged.
. . Recycled: The scrap yard or reclamation facility from which the material was purchased before remanufacture into a useful product. (Wood composites like MDF of particleboard, which are often made using recycled wood chips, the extraction site would be the mill that produced the chips.)
One caveat: If the raw material passes through mills, distributors, or other intermediates on its way from the extraction to fabrication, each of these ALSO must be within 500 miles of the project site to count as regional.

For MRc5, these are the critical data for assemblies:
+ . The cost of the assembly (excluding on-site installation labor, but including any pre-delivery fabrication costs);
+ . The assembly’s manufacturing location; and
+ . If the manufacturer is within 500 miles of the Project site, the percentage (by weight) of raw materials in the assembly extracted within 500 miles of the Project site.

To address the other half of your question, sometimes the approximate harvest site of the trees will suffice.

For example, if your plant lies within 500 miles of a project in Indianapolis, you would tally up the weights of all the components in the assembly that they purchased. Next, identify which components have extraction sites within 500 miles of Indy, and report their percentages compared to the total weight of the assembly.

Reporting that 12% of the assembly is wood from trees grown in western Tennessee would be good enough for this project because all of Tennessee lies within the 500-mile radius from Indy. However, if the wood came from central Pennsylvania, right on Indy’s 500-mile boundary, you would need to be more specific, perhaps reporting which county or zip code of the forest.

While researching the requirements for MRc5 (NC-2009), I found information on the USGBC site that states there are a possible of two points for Regional materials.

Option 1 requires 20% (twenty %) of the material value be MANUFACTURED within a 500 mile radius of the site. It does NOT mention harvesting or extraction in option 1.

Option 2 requires that 10% (ten %) of the material value be extracted, harvested AND manufactured within a 500 mile radius of the site.

Is each option the equivalent of 1 point?

It looks like this has changed from v2, 2.0 which states 20% manufactured only.....
Which is different than v2, 2.2 which states 10% extracted and manufactured.

Am I understanding this correctly?
Thank you!

Hi Eric,I think you must have been looking at the wrong set of requirements. What you're describing applies to LEED-NC 2.x, but NOT to LEED 2009 (except for the CI version). And might I suggest that you consider becoming a LEEDuser member? If you did that, you'd see the actual credit langauge right here, on this page, and not have that opportunity for confusion.  ;-)

Thank You Nadav. I'm working on trying to get my boss to get a membership. I agree it would be helpful. However, I'm more of an inquiring mind that wants to understand everything. Especially when I get conficting info from two or three different sources. The manufacturers we buy from are the ones that really need the membership. We are basically the middle-man passing along the info the manufacturers provide to us.

The information I was describing is for LEED 2009 CI version (I can't attach a screen shot in this forum).

Is each option (1 and 2) worth 1 point?

Yes, LEED-CI 2009 does work as you described. There is a separate forum on LEEDuser for talking about that rating system and credit, so you might want to take your questions about that over there: www.leeduser.com/credit/CI-2009/MRc5