Pick up the phone, call the local utility and a couple of green power providers—companies that sell renewable energy credits (RECs), which provide funding to renewable energy generation, supporting its development. Give them your project’s estimated energy consumption. Sit back and receive estimates.

That’s all it takes to find out what a purchase of offsite renewable energy will cost, so be sure to consider it—you might be pleasantly surprised. The credit requires you to offset only 35% of your electricity consumption with RECs to earn one point.

In general, complying with this prerequisite is standard practice in most urban and suburban areas, where most or all of the EPA Construction General Permit (CGP) requirements have been adopted and implemented at the state or county level. Regulators at those levels often threaten heavy fines for not complying with CGP requirements, so most projects do so without the added incentive of the LEED prerequisite.

Managing indoor air quality (IAQ) systematically during construction is becoming more and more common as contractors gain more experience with LEED. It benefits the health of everyone who works on the site, not just the eventual occupants of the building. 

The 10% point threshold is easy to achieve for this credit, especially if your project has a lot of concrete or steel. There is also an increasing number of products on the market that have recycled content, making the 20% threshold achievable for some projects. Concentrate on buying “big ticket” items with high recycled content levels. Depending on the building construction, you will generally get more (due to a higher cost) out of tracking the recycled content of concrete and steel over lower cost items like tile.

This credit is fairly straightforward and easy to achieve if you are newly creating all the hardscapes. You may comply by applying prescriptive design measures outlined by LEED to 50% of your site’s hardscape, or by covering 50% of your project's parking spaces.

There can be added costs and labor if your project needs to modify existing hardscapes to meet the prescriptive goals of the credit: for example, taking out a black asphalt parking lot to install a more reflective material.

This credit offers multiple options for residential and non-residential projects. These strategies help to reduce the number of cars on the road, cut down on the sprawl of parking facilities, and decrease the negative environmental impacts of parking infrastructure, including stormwater runoff and the urban heat island effect.