LEED the Way

Boards that want to save money and also save the environment may want to check out Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, better known as LEED, a rating system devised by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) that evaluates the environmental performance of a building and offers advice to owners about how they can make the switch to a sustainable – call it green – design.

As an introduction to LEED certification, there’s a new online guide that gives an overview of the process. Called LEED: The Way to a Sustainable Future with Sustainable Building Design, the site (http://bit.ly/LEED2017) was designed by Hendrick, a company that produces highly cosmetic, close-tolerance metal fabrications and perforated metals that can be used in energy-saving projects. For a deeper dive, the LEED website (https://new.usgbc.org/leed) walks you through the requirements necessary for certification.

Although LEED certification is widely used in new construction, Samantha Trejo, a spokeswoman for Hendrick, says that more and more older buildings are now becoming LEED-certified, making this new link a valuable resource. “LEED-certified buildings have 34 percent lower CO2 emissions,” she says, “and they consume 25 percent less energy and 11 percent less water, and divert over 80 million tons of waste from landfills.”