In 2002 I reviewed an excellent waste management study and developed a draft compression of the results. The work was part of a mostly free, partly paid services I provided to the USGBC consultant charged with developing the first version of the LEED CI Reference Guide.
The analysis part of the work was a free effort. The work was excluded from the CI Reference Guide. The decision to exclude was made by USGBC management who decided it was not necessary, and evidently never would be.
Ten years later, an amazing amount of time to lapse between a LEED resource being provided and rather than the resource provided, being asked to do the work yourself.
Bear in mind that this was a work in progress. Other than my developing it, and it being removed from the CI Ref Guide, no one else ever bothered to comment. Maybe it could use simplification. But, my approach was to allow others a word on how to get to the final simplified stage.
http://www.soltierra.com/public/MRp1_RG2002_DraftCreditRequirements.pdf
Harsha Sharma
Junior ArchitectJuly 31, 2012 - 1:15 am
Thank you for the detailed feedback. You've been a great help! I'm going to use the methodology to address my review comments.Hopefully it should satisfy the review team's comment.
Hernando Miranda
OwnerSoltierra LLC
344 thumbs up
July 31, 2012 - 12:54 pm
Harsha,
Sorry for the multiple posts. I was providing responses and after submitting they disappeared.
You shouldn't have to use everything I provided. It is more than should be necessary. The CIWMB report is the only one I know of the categorizes waste streams by business type and provides enough information to make some estimates about the volume of recycles a business could generate.
The old, and never used, document for the LEED CI Pilot, I provided a link to, was not intended to be used for reviewers to find fault with a project. The guidelines I developed were supposed to be non-enforceable guidelines.
During a LEED Pilot, the rules was, that potentially useful information should be provided to projects to help them green their projects. Rather than, challenge a project to develop the information themselves.
Hernando Miranda
OwnerSoltierra LLC
344 thumbs up
July 31, 2012 - 1:08 pm
Begin challenged to provide a study for waste management is certainly not in keeping with what LEED is supposed to be about.
The absolutely worst case I have run into was a reviewer demand to conduct an industry survey for a very unique process load system. There are only two engineering firms that owners would hire to design such a system.
The reviewer demand an industry survey of what? The design engineer's projects and their competitors work. Not exactly a survey, is it? How do you survey yourself, and your only competitor?
To make matters worse, we pointed out that conducted the demanded survey was ridiculous. The engineer clarified their approach and provided examples of their typical designs for comparison.
Guess what happened during the second design review? The reviewer insisted on the industry survey. The second time around the reviewer mentioned a survey they used to reject the approach used again.
The first review: Reviewer asks for an impossible industry survey.
The second review: Reviewer refers to an industry survey but fails to mention what the survey is.
The project was not provided with the so-called "survey" to refute that it was not applicable to the highly specialized systems used for the project.
Our conclusion were either, (1) the reviewer was using a survey provided by the sole-competitor of the design engineer. (2) The survey used was not entirely applicable to the project.
The reviewer's demand were unreasonable. The GBCI supported the reviewer. They did not understand the issue of self-survey and failure to provide a link to a supposed survey to the project being challenged.
The result of the above was --an owner with one LEED Platinum completed, one Platinum being challenged at an extreme level, more Platinums planned in the future-- the owner abandoned LEED altogether. Enough was enough, sadly.