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Bringing the right people to the table at the onset and aligning goals can save project teams valuable time and resources.

Requirements in the Integrative Process (IP) section encourage and reward finding connections between different building systems and processes. The strategies built into LEED often accomplish more than just one thing, and with this opening dialogue, projects can capitalize on those synergies.

Starting with a focus on reducing energy demand through guidance related to energy usage and efficiency, and then also rewarding renewables, LEED raises the bar on energy and offers new solutions for achieving goals.

Within the Energy and Atmosphere (EA) section, teams will find:

• With 20 percent of all points allocated to building energy efficiency, LEED has an increased emphasis on energy and the associated impacts.
• Emphasis on enhanced building commissioning for greater energy and operational performance.
• Benefits of smart-grid thinking through an option that rewards projects for participating in demand-response programs.

Every single system in a building is affected by water. It connects and interacts with everything. In the U.S., buildings account for 13.6 percent of potable water use.

The Water Efficiency (WE) section in the newest version of LEED addresses water holistically, taking into account indoor use, outdoor use, specialized uses and metering. It measures all sources of water related to a building, including cooling towers, appliances, fixtures, fittings, process water, and irrigation.

Whole-building-level water metering ensures projects can monitor and control their water use in order to identify opportunities for water savings. LEED v4 also encourages projects to reuse water, including reclaimed wastewater, graywater, condensate, process water, and rainwater, for irrigation, toilet flushing and more.

In its solid waste management hierarchy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ranks source reduction, reuse, recycling and waste to energy as the four preferred strategies for reducing waste.

The Materials and Resources (MR) section within LEED v4 directly addresses each of these recommended strategies that have been restructured and reprioritized from their original credits in LEED 2009.

LEED changes the paradigm for how decisions are made about materials that go into the buildings we spend so much of our time in by giving new information to decision makers.

• Usage: Within the Materials and Resources (MR) section, instead of saying a product is good or bad based on one attribute, e.g. recycled content, LEED enables project teams to have a more robust dialogue with manufacturers about optimizing around environmental, social and health impacts and better understand trade-offs. This category is designed to consider the entire life-cycle of the building, from extraction and manufacturing, to transport, operations, and maintenance and eventually the end of life.
• Life-cycle: Whole building life-cycle assessment encourages the architect to work with the structural engineer to investigate opportunities to reduce the embodied energy of materials by right-sizing the building’s structure. There can be as much as a 20-30 percent positive impact on the life cycle of the building by looking at bay sizing and slab depth. This is important because as buildings become more and more operationally efficient, the embodied impact of materials gets proportionally larger.
• Transparency: Environmental product declarations and material ingredient reporting tools, like Health Product Declarations, provide architects and designers more information on the contents in products and the manufacturing process. EPDs address how products are made, their material ingredients, and other tools provide information about who makes them. These three together address the triple bottom line and give architects a more complete set of information by which to select products.

By providing this information, manufacturers can better differentiate the progress they’ve made and demonstrate that improvement.

The first step toward environmental performance is selecting a good location.

For owners, proximity to existing utilities and street networks avoids the cost of bringing this infrastructure to the project site. Locating in vibrant, livable communities makes the building a destination for residents, employees, customers and visitors, and enables the building’s occupants to contribute to the area’s economic activity, creating a good model for future development.

A new section developed for LEED v4, Location and Transportation (LT) includes an emphasis on more advanced performance metrics — walking distance instead of straight line radius, trip counts instead of transit stops, absolute rather than relative parking requirements and bicycle networks in addition to bicycle storage.

A building’s impact is not restricted to what is inside it.

Strategies under Sustainable Sites (SS) address impacts by rewarding decisions about the environment surrounding the building, and emphasizing the vital relationships among buildings, ecosystems and ecosystem services. They focus on restoring project site elements, integrating the site with local and regional ecosystems, and preserving the biodiversity on which natural systems rely.

For example, LEED is changing the way we view runoff from precipitation. “Rainwater” is now seen as a resource that provides many environmental and economic benefits. Managing rainwater on site restores natural hydrologic conditions, reduces the possibility of flooding, and creates opportunities for onsite water reuse in applications like irrigation and landscape features.

Another example is found in the streamlined requirements of the Heat Island Reduction credit. A building’s roof and a building’s site area both influence the heat gain and retention of a project’s surroundings. By combining these elements into one credit, LEED holistically addresses microclimates impacted by heat islands.

Buildings and spaces with good indoor environmental quality protect the health and comfort of building occupants. Going a step beyond, high-quality indoor environments also work to improve the building’s value, enhance productivity, decrease absenteeism and reduce liability for building designers and owners.

Because some environmental issues are particular to a locale, we, with the help of our community leaders around the world, have identified distinct environmental priorities by area and the credits that address those issues. Teams are rewarded for pursuing and achieving existing LEED credits that address issues specific to the location of their projects.

The Regional Priority (RP) credits encourage project teams to focus on their local environmental priorities and there are six LEED v4 credit for every location.

Sustainable design strategies and measures are constantly evolving and improving. New technologies are continually introduced to the marketplace, and up- to-date scientific research influences building design strategies.

The purpose of the Innovation (IN) category is to recognize projects for innovative building features and sustainable building practices and strategies.

LEED has become a common language of best practices in buildings around the world. In the new rating system, there is greater recognition of regional context with the incorporation of regional and local equivalent standards or programs usable to achieve the same credit intent. Additionally, metric units have been included in all tools and resources.

View additional guidance for project teams around the world and let us know what you think. Is there an issue not addressed? We can help.