LEED and Your Home

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) are the people who created and maintain the LEED standards, the familiar Certified (used to be Green), Silver, Gold or Platinum rated buildings. LEED is the leading green building certification system, intended to verify that a building or community was designed and built using accepted generalized strategies aimed at: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources. The standards tend to be fairly generalized and not region specific, but should be appropriately applied to produce an environmentally responsible building. LEED provides building owners, operators and buyers a concise and measurable framework for identifying, implementing and comparing green building design, construction, operations and maintenance. The USGBC has expanded these basic standards from commercial construction to operations to single family homes and now have created REGREEN Residential Remodeling Guidelines. Not all of us can rush out and buy a LEEDS certified home. There is a tremendous amount of existing housing in the United States and the REGREEN guidelines can offer a roadmap to improving the environmental performance of our existing homes. Green remodeling also reduces the environmental impacts of remodeling, including energy, water, and materials consumption; waste generation; and harmful emissions, both indoors and out. If you want to take a look at some of the things you could do to improve the environmental performance of your home, explore the ideas and recommendations on the USGBC site. An example is “Reflective (high-albedo) roofing materials can help improve the thermal enevelop of your home.

There are eight areas of consideration in a LEEDS home. How these aspects are actually measured and quantified is the basis of the LEED scoring system. The first area is indoor air quality, a LEED home is designed to maximize fresh air indoors and minimize exposure to toxins and pollutants. This involves addresses air circulation, mixing and off gassing from building materials and furnishings. The second area is energy efficiency. In general LEED homes are built to use 20-30% less energy than the standard size typical home. Larger homes and homes that do not meet the goals in other areas can up their score by reducing the energy footprint of the home with energy generation. Most of the glamorous LEEDS homes you see need to meet a very strict home energy rating index because their footprint exceeds the reference size. An expensive, but quick way to neutralize size in LEEDS score is to shoot for a net zero home.

The next area is water efficiency; here is one of many areas where the standards lean towards urban and suburban issues. According to the USBGC wasteful water use is both costly and risky and tied to wasteful energy use: According to the U.S. Department of Energy, as much as ¼ - ½ of the electricity used by most U.S. cities is consumed at municipal water and wastewater treatment facilities. The LEED home standards encourage limiting water use and encouraging water reuse with grey water systems. In reality, water availability is a local issue. My water is supplied by a private well drilled into an incredibly productive aquifer. My wastewater is treated on site by an alternative on-site septic system. Thus my water is directly recycled back into the watershed. Water shed protection is the issue I worry about not water efficiency, though two decades in California has left me incapable of wasting water and our household water use is actually very low. Site Selection is another area where the standards judge based on old preconceptions. LEED encourages homes that are close to schools, shopping, work and transit. However, my husband and I live, work, and relax from home. Access to high speed internet, cable, and food supply sources were the important location issues we considered. In truth, I leave the house on average, three times a week. Coming from California, I worried about water availability, water quality and protection of the water shed.

The other areas of the LEED scoring system are site development, materials selection, resident awareness and innovation. It is essential that building a home and living in it not cause erosion, interfere with natural habitats and pollute waterways through storm water runoff and other actions. How you live in your house is just as important as how the house was built. At the end of the process, a home is awarded points in each area. Based on the number of points it receives, the home can be certified at one of the four levels: Certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum. LEED certification is both cool and desirable; however, it is not enough to ensure an environmentally responsible and sustainable existence. That is the result of all the elements of your life. The LEEDS tools especially the REGREEN guidelines are great tools for knowing what choices we have for our homes, but the sustainability and environmental impact of our lives is based on the total of all our choices.

Sustainable Living Rethinking the Approach

When I moved from city living to the outer edge of the suburbs sustainable living became a much more complicated topic and approach to life. In the city, sustainable living had been straight forward low impact green living. Work as an environmental consultant, recycle, choose well in purchases (local food, wine and other products), conserve water, limit travel, limit car use, live without heat or air conditioning (which is not particularly difficult in San Francisco). My footprint on the earth felt small. However, here on the outer edge of the suburbs the topic becomes much more complicated and I no longer have a firm definition of what sustainable living is, and I need to rethink sustainability and expand my view. First the easy, we do not commute beyond the walls of our home, but sustainable living is a complicated topic that needs to be fully explored.

Over the next several days let’s look at the various definitions of sustainable living. Sustainability has its earliest roots in the tools developed to assess the environmental, social and economic activities of life. The first approach that I am aware of was IPAT.
Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology
Affluence and technology were believed to worsen the impact of humanity on the natural world. This theory is attributed to Barry Commoner, Paul R. Ehrlich and John Holdren in 1971. The equation was developed in the 1970s during the course of a debate between them. Commoner who argued that environmental impacts in the United States were caused primarily by changes in its production technology following World War II, while Ehrlich (Population Bomb, 1968) and Holdren while emphasizing the role of population growth, argued that all three factors were important. There was a strong movement in the 1970’s for zero population growth and John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich strongly supported population control.

The past 28 years have given us the opportunity to evaluate these point of views. Despite widespread fears amongst environmentalists that populations would continue to expand at an exponential rate until checked by plague and famine, in recent years world population growth has slowed as women are having fewer children. This phenomenon is believed to be a result of a variation in the demographic transition theory in developed nations, as people become richer, mortality rates drop and they have fewer children. As a result, the UN believes that human population might stabilize around 9 billion by 2100. Of course, the supporters of population control questions if the earth can support 9 billion people in a sustainable fashion. I do not know what life on earth a hundred years from now will be.

History shows that Barry Commoner was more right than wrong. As time goes on we see the power of technology of production and living to change our impact on the earth. Affluence and technology have worked together in the United States to promote pollution prevention, remediation and environmental awareness. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams cleaner and the forests and preserves more expansive. It appears that after industrial development the next stage of an industrialized society, is environmentalism. The environmental movement and technology join together to reduce and prevent pollution in a number of industries. Waste reduction and point source reduction are the great successes of the second stage of industrial revolution. Technology can potentially take the next step into product reduction, by delivering services electronically. Consider, information and music. Just as we moved from vinyl, to CD’s to electronic music files, I am afraid that IPAT approach is very vinyl in this analysis. It appears that technology will deliver new aspects of life that are more electronic than physical, efficiencies will improve.

Currently, sustainability is tied in the public consciousness with ecological or carbon footprint. Next we will look at the carbon footprint as a method of determining an maintaining a sustainable existence.