According to the Healthcare reference guide under MRc5 Section 8 Examples: "furniture that meets the criteria for more than one option can be counted twice". A $100 item where 95% meets Option 1 and 100% meets Option 2 contributes $195. This means that the sustainable furniture percentage could be greater than 100% for a project.
I submitted a project with a sustainable furniture value that was 165% of the total furniture cost. The reviewer commented that the total furniture cost was less than the sustainable cost and that the number needed to be revised. This seems to directly contradict the reference guide. Does anyone else have experience with this credit and can provide input?
Mara Baum
Partner, Architecture & SustainabilityDIALOG
674 thumbs up
February 26, 2015 - 11:39 am
First of all, congrats on such a great percentage! I do hope that you share some of your strategies and/or products with those of us who are just starting out.
I think that the reviewer is not properly educated on this credit. The Dell Children's Hospital LEED HC Platinum project achieved a greater than 100% value for this credit, which gave them 2 points plus one for exemplary performance. However, I did notice that in the USGBC's article about the project, they listed the total compliance as 100%. It may be a matter of semantics.
There's a point at which an increased value over 50% doesn't matter, because more than that does not increase your LEED score - but it's certainly great to be able to share your success with the accurate percentage.
Dell Children's scorecard - http://www.usgbc.org/projects/dell-childrens-mcct-bt-3.
USGBC blog post - http://www.usgbc.org/articles/healthy-high-performance-healing-environme...
Catherine Adams
Architectural AssociateAstorino|CannonDesign
February 26, 2015 - 4:35 pm
Thank you for the quick reply, Mara! We were fortunate to have a superb furniture coordinator. Thank you for the example and links; I am glad that there is an example of this rule being successfully implemented on a project.
Susan Walter
HDRLEEDuser Expert
1296 thumbs up
February 27, 2015 - 10:16 am
Echoing Mara's congratulations. One other thought about documenting exceptional performance is that generally anything over 95% gets extra scrutiny and is met with skepticism. I find it really helps to well narrate that the achievement does reach that level. This is just an observation over a lot of credits and a lot of years of LEED documentation.
Mara Baum
Partner, Architecture & SustainabilityDIALOG
674 thumbs up
February 27, 2015 - 12:09 pm
True. You're so far over the 50% mark for EP that I don't think it will be a big issue.