SwampFox

Human Health, Core of LEED

Submitted by: Dan Gerst on Jun 08, 2010 at 2:53 pm Tagged with: green building, indoor air quality, LEED Source: USGBC

Last week, the Environment and Human Health Inc. (EHHI) organization issued a report entitled "LEED Certification: Where Energy Efficiency Collides with Human Health." This report makes some outrageously ill-informed statements about LEED that have been published by the media.

On behalf of the 17,000 members and volunteers, the USGBC takes serious issue with the EDDI report for its lack of understanding about the role that the LEED rating system plays in raising the bar on improved indoor air quality.

The U.S. Green Building Council, developers of the LEED Green Building Rating System, clearly shares a common mission with EHHI, a nonprofit dedicated to "protecting human health from environmental harms through research, education and the promotion of sound public policy," in that we care deeply about human health. In fact, human health and how it is tied to environmental health is at the core of the LEED rating system. To suggest something contrary, suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the role LEED plays as a catalyst for action.

We could not agree more with the need for serious action on improved indoor air quality. But this report fails to provide a complete picture of how interconnected the built environment and public health truly are.

Since the launch of the first LEED rating system 10 years ago, we have been on a continuous improvement cycle to enhance the LEED system. Our goal is to continually evolve this tool that engages everyone involved with buildings -- from the owner to the designer to the manager and the occupants -- to act and deliver high performance healthy buildings and communities.

Can LEED as a tool be improved? Yes, always! Does LEED reflect the realities of a voluntary system of change? Yes! In other words, we are always helping to guide the market, balancing forces that want status quo and those that want immediate, far-reaching change.

To suggest that the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) section of LEED is the only place LEED addresses public health, is to show a fundamental lack of knowledge about the LEED rating system. As noted in detail in our Foundations Documents (our constitution for how LEED is developed), LEED credits are specifically designed to be cross-cutting. This is because the human health benefits associated with reduced building energy use and associated particulate matter, mercury and so on; reduced transportation emissions from gasoline and diesel use; increased community walk-ability; decreased waste-water generation; and the numerous other cross-cutting human health issues addressed by LEED's integrative framework are well documented.

There’s not a LEED Platinum project to date that did not maximize the specific IEQ credits, and even though it may be theoretically possible to certify a project at any level that does not include practices of improved indoor air quality, it is virtually impossible to achieve higher levels of LEED without achieving these credits.

The suggestion that energy efficiency is given “priority” over human health is similarly misleading. The two issues are inextricably linked and this report fails to mention how LEED helps project teams optimize cross-cutting issues. Additionally, the report uses pointed words like “alarm” and “danger” that could actually delay the continued transformation of the building industry in areas where clear action is warranted and long overdue.

We have more work ahead of us than we do behind us in order to create a world that is better for human health. The USGBC and EDDI should be work together to accelerate this progress.