Hawaii Sheet Metal Workers Training Fund 1(808)841-6106
GREEN / LEED
Construction
What is LEED?
- Founded in 1993, the USGBC is a member-based, non-profit organization that was with the mission "to transform the way buildings and communities are designed, built and operated, enabling an environmentally and socially responsible, healthy and prosperous environment that improves the quality of life."
- Providing tools and expertise to the design and construction industry at large, education to the public, and forums for industry dialogue, the USGBC's most prominent achievement that it created Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating Systems (often referred to simply as "LEED"), which is described in more detail later in this unit.
- USGBC membership has grown from under 100 members in 1997, to over 20,000 member companies and organizations. Local and regional chapters promote USGBC programs, offer education, develop programs, and advocate for green building in their communities.
- The LEED for New Construction (LEED-NC) pilot program (version 1.0) was launched in October 1998, with the first version (2.0) available to the public in June 2000. The first LEED-NC Reference Guide was released in April 2001. Other LEED "products" that address the unique challenges and priorities of other market sectors followed starting in 2002. There have been several updates since then.
- LEED's goal is to help promote market transformation marked by the mainstreaming of high performance or green building practices.
- LEED addresses environmental performance at all stages of building life cycle, and for multiple market sectors.
-With the exception of LEED for Homes and LEED for Neighborhood Development all LEED rating systems are organized around five categories of environmental concern plus two bonus categories
-Categories of concern:
• Sustainable Sites
• Water Efficiency
• Energy & Atmosphere
• Materials & Resources
• Indoor Environmental Quality
• Bonus categories:
• Innovation & Design Process
• Regional Property
- Within each credit category the rating system contains prerequisites (not optional) for certification and credits (optional) but the more earned the higher the certification level.
- Credits may require the implementation of prescriptive measures or set thresholds of performance that can be met in a variety of ways. For example, a prescriptive credit requires that all composite wood in the project contains no added urea formaldehyde while a performance-based credit requires a certain percentage of energy use reduction beyond code.
- The Innovation & Design Process category rewards projects for performance achievements not already specified in the rating system exemplary levels of performance on existing credits and the involvement of a LEED Professional on the project team
- The Regional Priority category awards bonus points for achieving existing credits that have been identified by regional committees as particularly important to a given region For example in drought stressed areas bonus points may be awarded for achieving water reduction related credits.
The Growing Green Building Market
- Many people assume that, because green building features are relatively new or marketed as fashionable or cutting edge, there must be a large cost premium for building green.
- However, while surveys have shown that even building professionals tend to estimate this "green premium" as being on average 16%, current research reports that the cost of green building projects falls into the same range as the cost of conventional building projects.
- In other words, there are low and high budget green projects, just as there are low and high budget conventional projects. Indeed, it is safe to say that if green building didn't make sense financially, we would not be seeing the strong growth in the green building market that we are seeing today.
- The green building market share in residential and commercial construction has grown rapidly in recent years and is projected to continue doing so.
- A2009 report by the U.S. Green Building Council and Booz Allen Hamilton estimates that the green building industry added $173 billion to U.S. GDP between 2000 and 2008. Even in the face of harsh economic pressures, this share is expected to increase to $554 billion from 2009 to 2013, including the creation of 7.9 million jobs.
- Even if these projections are high, the tide has definitely turned toward widespread recognition of the economic opportunities-for the sheet metal industry and others-~presented by the emergence of the green building industry. A wide-ranging 2005 study concluded that green building projects are quicker to secure tenants, can charge higher rents, have lower turnover, cost less to operate and maintain, and improve business productivity-all of which have a positive impact on the financial bottom line.
Green Building Strategies
The purpose of the integrated design process is to:
- Encourage collaboration among project team members.
- Involve everyone early in the project to provide best chance for creative solutions.
- Create an opportunity for sheet metal workers to provide feedback on costs and benefits.
- Green building is the constantly evolving set of planning, design, construction and building operations and maintenance best practices and new technologies that has evolved in response to this increased understanding of the social, economic and environmental impacts of development.
- The changing nature of the green building industry and the environmental imperative to achieve higher and higher levels of performance means that there is no one right set of strategies for a particular project type or even project.
- Highly educated and creative project teams must select the strategies and technologies that make the most sense and work together to yield the best results. The most effective way to ensure that this happens is to use an integrated design process.
- The purpose of integrated design is to create a collaborative process in which all team members are able to contribute their expertise as it relates to the project goals at every stage of project development. Equally important, it affords the opportunity for the various team members to respond to proposed design and construction strategies in real-time and early in the project while design is still readily impressionable.
- For example, if the general contractor and structural engineers aren't involved in early discussions about a proposed rainwater harvesting system, it won't be able to communicate relevant constructability and cost issues that may be optimized with a design modification.
-For sheet metal workers, the opportunity to provide feedback on your experience installing, operating, and maintaining particular architectural features or mechanical systems can help the project team in evaluating related costs and benefits.
- An integrated design process, unlike conventional design processes, is not linear. Project team members do not pass responsibility from one to the next. Rather, all relevant team members give input at all points.
- An integrated approach to green building encourages members of the team to think beyond their own scope of work in order to treat the project as a whole rather than a sum of its parts.