The beneficial attributes of LEED Certification

Who Uses LEED Certification?

Many professionals, including architects, real estate professionals, facility maintenance, engineers, interior designers, landscape architects, construction managers, finance and government entities all use LEED to help transform the built environment to sustainability.

State, local and county agencies across the United States that are adopting LEED for publicly funded existing building renovation or new construction projects.

Federal agencies, including the all branches of the military, General Services Administration and the Departments of interior, Immigration, Agriculture, Energy, and State, have LEED initiatives.

And many LEED projects are already in progress in many different countries – among these Canada, Brazil, Mexico and India.

What does LEED delivers

Involvement in LEED gives building managers and operators the tools they need to have an measurable and quantifiable impact on their buildings’ overall performance. There are both environmental, occupant and financial benefits to earning LEED certification.

LEED Certified buildings are intended to:

Lower operating costs and increase asset value

Reduce waste sent to landfills

Conserve energy gas and electricity and

Conserve water resources

Create a healthier and safer indoor atmosphere for occupants

Reduce harmful GHG emissions

Potential qualify for tax rebates, zoning allowances and other incentives in hundreds of cities

Furthermore, an organization’s participation in the consensus based point based system LEED process will demonstrates leadership, innovation, environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

How do I get started

Register to attend our LEED professional series starting with the Green Associate course and followed by LEED AP and become an expert with LEED professional credentials that will distinguish you as a building professionals with the knowledge and skills to successfully steward the LEED certification process.

PTL Exam Prep

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The Green Economy Post: Green Careers, Green Business, Sustainability

If you’re managing a LEED project, one of your first challenges will be getting your team to think a little differently about how the LEED project team works together and how the LEED building project is managed. On a typical building project your design team may get together in a room with the client, talk about the client’s goals, objectives and project needs — and then once the project is kicked off, everyone seems to scatter and go off and do their own thing. The mechanical engineer focusses on the HVAC needs. Your landscape architect is busy doing land surveys and designing the landscape. Your electrical engineer gets started identifying the electrical and indoor and outdoor lighting needs for the project. Team members only seem to get involved with one another on an as-needed basis.

With a LEED project, you need to take a totally different approach. LEED projects require that you create an integrated design from day-one of the project. In fact, the ultimate success of your LEED project truly depends on managing your LEED project with an integrated design approach.

So what exactly is “integrated design”? An integrated design approach means that your team collaborates together right from the beginning of the project. In typical building projects, the design process does not try to identify synergies or optimization among the various disciplines and team members. Decisions are often made by fewer people and in isolation. One of the main benefits of an integrated design approach is that it allows your team to develop synergies that will not only help you create a better building for your client, but it will also increase the likelihood of you achieving your LEED credits and certification. Synergy like this allows the various disciplines to optimize the building design and decisions can be made together to ensure that they work collectively to achieve the various credits you are trying to achieve.

Life cycle costing is also emphasized in an integrated design. Life-cycle costing is a way to assess the total building cost over time, taking into consideration initial costs, operating costs and maintenance costs. You’ll also want to take in the social and environmental benefits of the LEED project when evaluating life-cycle costing.

In a traditional project, systems are considered in isolation. A successful LEED projects require your team to think of the WHOLE building and all of the systems together as they’re working on the LEED project.

Even though an integrated-design approach requires more efforts at the front-end – a lot of time and energy will be invested upfront early in the design phase where you have maximum flexibility to impact the design and coordinate everything with your LEED goal objectives. Integrated design is one of the keys to completely a successful LEED project.

Succeed at LEED

I’m working on a video tutorial on how to use LEEDOnline.com. I’m looking for Architectures, Mechanical Engineers, Landscape Designers, Electrical Engineers, Contractors, etc. to fill in the sample templates on my sample LEED project — so I can use those templates as examples in my video tutorial.

If you’d like to get practice filling out real LEED project templates and getting first-hand experience working in the LEEDOnline.com environment, please e-mail me at sherry @ succeedatleed.com and tell me a little bit about your background (electrical engineer, construction, mechanical engineer, etc.)

I don’t want you to add any proprietary information about projects you’re actually working on (so don’t include any actual client info) — I’m just looking for sample filled-out templates to show in my video tutorial.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Succeed at LEED

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The Green Economy Post: Green Careers, Green Business, Sustainability