MRc5 for a convention hall with two restaurants

The food purchased by the business renting the convention space is included in the scope of the project. The LEED EBOM Reference Guide makes it clear on page 294 that purchases from multiple tenants are included in the scope of the credit – while the businesses renting space may be doing so on a very short term basis, they are still purchasing food and beverages for use on the site. With that said, I understand that it would be very difficult to track these purchases (and all of the sustainability criteria details) as the purchases are not controlled by the owner/manager of the facility. On page 294, there is also guidance for excluding up to 10% of the project buildings total floor area, which gives you some leeway as you consider how to treat these conference spaces.

To document food harvested and produced within a 100-mile radius, I recommend first establishing the location of the harvest and/or production facility. This can be done via product detail or statement from the manufacturer. Next, I would explicitly show the distance from the harvest and/or production facility to the site by identifying those two locations and the distance between them on a map. Google Maps or Google Earth work well for this sort of measurement.

Best of luck to you!

I think Natalie's reply on the issue of the outside catering is totally logical and its very likely that GBCI would agree. Certainly a company who brings in an outside catering service for their own functions in their own building must include those purchases in the credit calculation. However, I think there's an interesting counterargument that in this (admittedly rare) situation, the parallel is closer to that of an employee who brings lunch from home. This food purchasing situation is significantly more removed from the situation where a long-term tenant's purchasing choices must be included in purchasing data, because your tenants are by nature extremely short-term (and therefore totally outside the control of the building management, much like the individual food purchases of employees bringing lunch from home). It really falls neatly into the cracks between situations anticipated by the rating system. That being said, I wholly agree that Natalie's conclusion is the safest bet, but if you really had a case to make about purchases outside the catering service purchases, I might be tempted to try it. Of course, the above is based on a presumption on my part that the space-renters are contracting with a wide variety of outside/external caterers, rather than with a single catering service which operates in partnership with the building itself; in the latter instance, Natalie's recommendation is ironclad.

Hope that doesn't muddy the waters,

Dan