Trees

It should be counted towards the total construction waste diverted.

SERA Architects, I always interpreted the LEED Reference Guide v 2009, page 357 "...landclearing debris do not contribute to the MRc2 Construction Waste credit..." as trees are considered landclearing debris. I have a project similar to Norma's where we had tree's removed and would be returning as mulch and casework. My team intended to count this material as MRc5 Regional materials only and will be excluding them from the MRc2 waste diversion calculations. SERA, I would be interested to know if you have submitted projects with trees counting as waste diversion and received credit? How recently was that, if I might ask? Thank you.

Yes, SERA has had success on one project where wood from onsite trees wereused for casework. This would fall under Material Reuse credit but since we didn't have enough quantity to meet the credit threshold, we counted it under waste diverted. This was done for a NC v2.2 project several years ago.

To SERA Architects, it is difficult to tell what you did to qualify the onsite trees as construction waste. It doesn’t sound to me like it qualified, unless you milled the trees into casework and then had casework scrap waste but no tree scrap. But it sounds like you counted all the trees as waste diverted, regardless of the fact that onsite trees cannot count towards the waste total for this credit. When you say that “We had success on one project…” claiming onsite trees as construction waste, keep in mind that LEED follows the honor system when it comes to documentation claims. And many of the credits, such as in v2.2, didn’t require backup data. It relied on what you called the waste and where you said it was going. Even v3 only requires backup data for Comingled Waste. So depending on how it was portrayed, it might not have been questioned. If it was listed as “Onsite Trees” going to “casework “ I doubt very highly it would have been accepted as diverted in the review for MRc2. Don’t get me wrong, I love that the some of the trees got used for casework. But whether it met the MRc2 requirements is another matter.