LEED 2012 v3 - Material Life Cycle Disclosure and Assessment

The USGBC should continue to offer some version of its previous options for documenting material compliance. This new approach is not ready for prime-time. Lifecycle information is not commonly available and there are no free public databases that provide a wide variety of building products that have achieved this type of certification. There are many critical factors that go into choosing materials, not the least of which are cost, ease of access and availability. How much research is reasonable to have to do on every product that goes into a building? Who will have the time or resources? If LEED makes this process too complex, time consuming and expensive, practitioners and owners will be forced to look for alternatives. No one wants to do that. Based on some quick research, we can only find one subscription-based but not particularly robust database (Pharos.) There appear to be only 814 products in 9 categories profiled in the Building Product Library. Some products are only available from one plant in North America and some, although transparent, do not have particularly good ratings. While this change would be fantastic for our friends at BuildingGreen who (I admire greatly and) manage Pharos and lots of other great green building tools, I don't think the USGBC is appreciating what a chilling effect this increase in complexity and lack of widely available materials will have on LEED. The requirement for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR ) or closed loop recycling is once again going well beyond the current state of the marketplace. The EPA website on EPR lists only batteries, electronics, packaging, carpet, mercury containing products and under "other products," radioactive materials, pesticides, propane gas tanks, one Herman Miller chair, and Armstrong World Industries Ceiling Tiles. We found lots of reports and working groups on the concept but not a lot of materials that qualify. Where does one find a comprehensive listing of products that meet this criteria? How would a project reach 50% of non-structural products? Also, how does LEED define a closed loop recycling program? Does pre-consumer recycling count? Is 1% of the material enough to qualify? This credit should remain in the Pilot Library or USGBC should figure out how to let projects document materials credits in the old way while they introduce this approach as an optional path.