LEED Replacement

Federal Government Looking To Replace LEED by a different standard

The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design may be usurped as the sole green-rating program endorsed by the U.S. General Services Administration for federal buildings.
In what has become a protracted review of the federal government’s use of green-building systems, the GSA published a notice Feb. 5 in the Federal Register seeking public comment for an additional 60 days on how the government uses third-party certification systems. It is at least the third attempt by the GSA to gain insight into public attitudes.
The GSA owns 1,500 commercial buildings nationwide and leases space in another 8,100, representing 370 million square feet of occupancy. The federal government as a whole owns or leases approximately 370,000 buildings with more than 3.36 billion square feet.
The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act mandates that the GSA recommend to the U.S. Secretary of Energy every five years how the federal government can best use ratings programs and other tools to ensure the nation’s largest user of commercial buildings is operating a “high performance” portfolio.
In the law’s initial implementation, the GSA recommended the LEED program alone to the Energy secretary. But as part of the first five-year review, completed last May, the GSA evaluated two additional systems, the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge and Green Building Initiative’s Green Globes.  

The federal government has been a leader in the green-building movement, reducing its own energy and water use by substantial margins, said Jason Hartke, vice president of national policy and advocacy at the U.S. Green Building Council.
But federal agencies including the GSA are under presidential executive order to do more, to “lead by example” to cut greenhouse gas emissions and exist sustainably while “leveraging” the federal government’s unique position in the marketplace to encourage development and production of “environmentally preferable materials, products and services …”
Interest in the GSA’s decision has been intense not only within the government’s ranks but also those of the private sector. The American Chemistry Council complained that the federal government should not rely solely on LEED after a proposed update to the LEED system was to include more requirements surrounding the use of chemicals in building materials. After its own internal review, the GSA convened an ad hoc “discussion group” that included its representatives and others from the departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture, State, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency.
That group has concluded, after multiple meetings and two public hearings, that none of the three standards meets all of the federal government’s needs but that parts of Green Globes and LEED fit best.
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