This credit is focused on limiting environmental impacts from automobile use. It targets commuting specifically, but also addresses company vehicle fleets, maintenance vehicles, and buses.

If your project has substantial parking area, you may find the requirements of this credit to be low-hanging fruit, because you should easily be able to designate preferred parking for low-emitting and fuel-efficient vehicles, which is one option. There are other options for compliance, all of varying difficulty and requiring varying levels of commitment from the project owner.

This credit offers a variety of strategies for residential, non-residential and mixed use 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. 

This credit focuses on diverting waste from landfills by finding multiple alternatives for end uses of the waste, namely recycling, reuse on site, donation for reuse on another site, or resale. All of these diversion methods count towards credit compliance—50% construction waste diverted for one point, 75% for two points.

Look for opportunities to prevent the generation of waste on construction sites because the less waste you generate, the less you have to recycle or reuse to earn the credit.

This credit is meant to reduce the number of cars on the road and limit the sprawl of parking facilities. It also helps encourage carpooling and reduce transportation-related environmental impacts like emissions, stormwater runoff, and the urban heat island effect.

You have three options to earn this credit:

This prerequisite is a big one, not only because it’s required for all projects, but also because it feeds directly into EAc1: Optimize Energy Performance, where about a fifth of the total available points in LEED are at stake. Master these minimum requirements, and you can use the same compliance path as in EAp2 to earning points.

USGBC's membership approved an update to LEED 2009 effective April 8, 2016. The update only affects LEED 2009 projects registered on or after that date.