Question: "We're considering pursuing LEED certifications, but it seems like an enormous undertaking. Where do you suggest we start?"
Steve’s Answer: The first thing I am going to tell you to do is ---- Green Cleaning. Frankly you should do whether or not you do LEED because it’s easy and a good way to learn about sustainability and other “green” issues.
In addition, there are three basic paths you can follow. The first path is if you’re not quite sure you can qualify and there isn’t a major push from the “head honchos” to get LEED certified. In this scenario, you want to test the water to determine if you qualify before investing a lot of time. The second scenario is that your organization is determined to follow LEED even if you don’t currently qualify. And the third scenario is that you want to use LEED as a “roadmap”, or kind of comprehensive set of best-practices and “certification” really isn’t the issue (you may do it and you may not --- certification is not the primary driver).
In the first scenario, I would recommend that you start by determining if your building meets the minimum EPA’s Energy Star Rating of 60 to qualify. The reason I suggest this as a first step is because if you are at least a 60 Energy Star Rating my experience is that you can get certified without any investments in capital changes to the building (it may be a lower rating, but you can get certified). Below 60 typically means you will have to invest in some upgrades to improve your energy efficiency --- which will cost you money. And please know that there is typically a good payback, but it will nonetheless cost you money upfront.
If your company has directed you to get certified, then I recommend that you consider hiring a LEED consultant. Please know that I do NOT provide this kind of service and thus am NOT telling you this just to make a sale. I have simply observed that there are lots of things to consider which typically include doing an audit to determine where you currently are ---- the credits you can easily achieve with little or no cost, those credits that you can’t get without huge investments (which may never happen), and then the credits in the middle which are a possibility.
Once you go through this exercise and figure out where you are, you can begin to prioritize which credits you want to go after. When you do this, the most effective path is to divide the credits up based on who within your organization would be responsible for them. For example, one group might be responsible for all the cleaning credits, another the energy and water credits, another the purchasing credits, etc. And just start knocking them off one by one until you’re ready to submit your application for certification.
And in scenario three, I would follow the above recommendations for scenario two. Frankly there is no difference between two and three since LEED really is just about best-practices.
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