Regional Material

Susan, it sounds like you're wondering if your products can contribute to LEED credits.In that case, the 500-mile radius is set around the LEED project, not around your plant. So the question would be what, if any, region of the country has both you and those mines within its 500-mile radius. And yes, it's the mines in this case, as we're looking for the point of origin for the material. If recycled content, it could be a scrap yard nearby the fabricator.

Susan—The 500-mile radius is measured from the LEED Project site, not from the manufacturing location to the raw material source. Therefore, for your product to qualify as regionally manufactured, your factory must be within 500 miles of the project. For the components of your product to qualify as regionally extracted, their point of manufacture (in this case, the coil mill) as well as the extraction &/or reclamation sites of their raw materials must also be within 500 miles of the project. If only some of the raw materials come from within 500 miles, only that percentage (by weight) counts as regionally extracted. Therefore, for any recycled content in the steel, the extraction site is the scrap yard or reclamation facility from which the mill purchases the recycled materials. If portions of the steel come from ore, those portions’ extraction sites are the mines that produced the ore. The mill may be able to provide percentages and locations for you. LEED CI-2009 offers two options for earning MRc5 credits. Option 1 counts only regional manufacture. Option 2 counts both manufacturing and extraction. Therefore, if you can’t provide extraction data, your products may contribute only toward Option 1. [By contrast, LEED-NC & -CS require contributing products to be both regionally manufactured and regionally extracted.] This is Regional Material in a nutshell. I hope this helps.