Environment: Green goes Mainstream

Aside from the sparkling blue solar panels in its brick facade, nothing about the Solaire’s appearance hints that it is a “green building.” This new luxury high-rise in New York’s Battery Park City blends seamlessly with its neighbors, with no hint of the wastewater recycling system, an energy-efficient curtain wall, central air filtration, and other sustainable features inside. Most residents are more interested in their river views and granite countertops than the recycled water in their toilets.

The Solaire is typical of a new generation of green buildings built by mainstream developers for mainstream clients. Like office and factory buildings by Toyota, Herman Miller, and IBM, the Solaire reduces its environmental impact while still meeting both market real estate preferences and the developer’s need to make a profit. It was designed in keeping with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), which is a rating system developed by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). LEED is a voluntary system that evaluates performance based on a checklist of design practices evaluating every part of a building. Buildings that meet its standards are recognized at the “Certified,” “Silver,” “Gold,” or “Platinum” levels, depending on the number of green design strategies they use. The Solaire, which expects to earn LEED Gold, is the first building developed under Battery Park City’s new green building guidelines, themselves modeled after LEED.

It’s hard to overestimate the role of LEED and the USGBC in catapulting green building into the mainstream. In just three years, LEED has become the standard for green buildings in the U.S. Other countries in North America, Europe, and Asia are poised to adopt systems based on it. Seventy-four buildings are LEED-certified; over a thousand are pursuing certification. And a growing number of private corporations and government entities, including the federal government’s General Services Administration and the city of Seattle, now require their buildings to meet standards based on LEED.

A Carrot, not a Stick

LEED measures building performance using a carefully calibrated, 69-point checklist. LEED’s credit system promotes a range of green building practices and sets quantitative goals for reaching them. For example, projects get points for locating within a half-mile of public transit, drawing 5 percent of building energy from renewable sources, obtaining 20 percent of building materials from within a 500-mile radius, and providing daylight and views to 75 percent of occupied spaces. Buildings that earn at least 26 points are recognized as LEED Certified–the lowest tier of certification. The highest tier, LEED Platinum, requires at least 52 points.

LEED is designed to be easy to use. “LEED works because it’s simple. The system fits on one page at its most basic,” says Rob Watson, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and chair of the LEED Steering Committee. Designers can use any combination of points to get certification and can use any design strategy to meet performance goals. LEED also rewards designers who go beyond the checklist. “If you achieve the intent of a LEED credit through different means, you can earn a credit equivalency,” says Watson. “And innovation credits recognize exceptional performance in areas that are not covered by LEED.” The LEED system itself is flexible and evolves through regular revisions by USGBC member committees.

Supporters hope LEED will reorient mainstream developers, at least the ones with high standards of construction, towards greener building. “LEED sets a standard that the top 25 percent of the market can achieve,” says Watson. “It is rigorous enough to make a difference, but not so far outside everyday practice as to be out of reach.” LEED credits offer manageable steps within the framework established by existing building codes and practices, since these codes are “the recognized standard,” according to Watson, “and there is already a vast society organized around them.” By recognizing developers who take the initiative to build green, Watson says, “LEED offers an incentive to go beyond the minimum required by code.”

That incentive, according to LEED’s authors, is primarily economic. USGBC literature describes LEED as a national brand that enables green buildings to “achieve premium value within their local markets.” LEED signals to consumers that they are buying a greener product and distinguishes developers for making that product. Rather than try to change the rules of the real estate development game, LEED seeks to improve existing practice by rewarding innovation. This approach is a practical one, and it seems to be working: after just three years, LEED’s market share is nearly five percent of new commercial construction.

Shades of Green

How green are LEED-certified buildings? According to Nadav Malin, editor of the independent journal Environmental Building News, LEED certification is a reliable indicator of building performance. “LEED Certified and Silver are not leading edge, but they signify a step beyond everyday practice,” he says. “The Gold and Platinum ratings are really as green as advertised.” NRDC’s Rob Watson points out that Platinum buildings must earn twice as many points as Certified projects. “Of the nearly one hundred buildings certified by LEED, only two have earned Platinum ratings in the current version,” he says. “I think that shows that we set the levels about right.” Sophisticated observers of green building understand the difference between Certified and Platinum. “When LEED first came out, we covered every new Certified building,” Malin says. “Now, it must be Gold or Platinum to be worth writing up.”

Sustainability is often described in relation to uniquely local environmental concerns, but LEED is meant to enable comparison of buildings stretched over national and even international markets. To do that, the system makes generalizations that can prevent deeper comparison. LEED ratings do not reflect how well suited the strategies used are to a building’s particular site or climate. For example, storm water management is often more important in cities than in rural areas, while energy use varies greatly between temperate and tropical climate zones. USGBC is working to adapt LEED to local conditions, but Watson notes that it will be difficult. “It will require a careful balancing of local and global concerns,” he says. “Saving water is not as high a priority in the Pacific Northwest as it is in the Southwest. But wasting energy in the Southwest is just as bad as it is in the Northwest.” Watson says that USGBC is “unlikely to develop different standards for different climates,” due to the complexity of regional differences and the structure of the construction industry–major developers and suppliers are closely connected national organizations, so the broader the standards, the easier and more likely it is that such companies will put them into practice nationwide. The approach of municipalities like Seattle and Portland, however, suggests a way to compensate for regional variation; these cities mandate LEED for certain types of construction but augment the standards to reflect local conditions.

Design by Checklist

LEED’s creators have done an impressive job by condensing green building strategies into a simple, yet comprehensive list. But in reducing green building to a checklist, LEED risks shrinking the amount of thought that goes into green design. As Nadav Malin says, “You do see people focusing the design process to get LEED credits. It’s an unfortunate use of the tool.” But, he adds, LEED provides a positive framework for design teams who don’t know where to start. Architect Joel Towers, a partner at SR+T Architects and director of the Sustainable Design Program at New York’s Parsons School of Design, sees LEED as an adaptation to an industry that undervalues architectural design. “In the U. S., design is supposed to account for ten percent of the project budget–the equivalent of a sketch on a napkin,” he says. “Seventy to eighty percent of buildings never see an architect.” When few architects have time for conventional design, it’s no surprise that they need a blueprint like LEED to go green.

LEED offers a by-the-numbers approach to reducing a project’s environmental impact, but not to improving its aesthetic or experiential qualities. Few people think that LEED is the right tool for this kind of qualitative change. As Rob Watson says, LEED should “absolutely not” address aesthetic concerns. “You need five different people to be able to agree about the value of a building,” he says. “Leave aesthetics out of it.” Towers agrees: “If LEED were an aesthetic or qualitative measuring post, it would easily become a kind of building police force telling designers what they can and cannot do,” he says. By focusing on low-environmental impact design, LEED suggests that any building can be green, regardless of its architectural style or political intent.

While low-impact design rightly addresses the immediate effects of environmental degradation, it also implies that green building doesn’t require a new, more expansive design aesthetic. As green architect Bill McDonough writes, “being ‘less bad’ is no good.” Instead of “aiming for zero,” he envisions green buildings that celebrate nature’s abundance, maximize beauty and delight, and inspire a positive vision of change. David Orr, chair of Oberlin’s Environmental Studies Program, identifies similar positive ecological design principles: “preserve diversity, both cultural and biological; utilize current solar income; create little or no waste; account for all costs; and respect larger cultural and social patterns.” Orr and McDonough collaborated on an environmental studies center at Oberlin that embodies these principles: it generates much of its own electricity, purifies its own wastewater, and restores surrounding habitat. Though the LEED checklist might have led the building’s architects to similar results, they began with different questions: not “how many points can I earn?” but “how can I build without causing ugliness somewhere else or at some later time?”

Marketing Green Building

Green building must be economically viable to succeed in the long run. But promoting green building on its economic merits, as LEED does, can be a hard sell in an economy that rewards quick profits and ignores external costs. So why do companies pursue LEED certification? NRDC’s Rob Watson notes that it helps the bottom line. “Companies know that green buildings are more profitable, higher quality, and lower risk,” Watson says. There is ample evidence that green strategies pay off through reduced operating expenses, higher employee productivity, and higher rents. One report estimates that LEED Gold and Platinum save builders nearly $70 per square foot over twenty years, while costing only two to seven percent more up front. This is good news for owner-builders, but many developers sell buildings after just a few years–before environmental strategies can turn a profit. Private developers are also unlikely to be swayed by the public benefits of building green, since most costs of pollution, global warming, and species loss do not impact the company’s financial report.

Watson also cites LEED’s value as a marketing tool. “Companies recognize the prestige of green building and its ability to distinguish their products in the market,” he says. At the Solaire, where a two-bedroom apartment rents for $5,000 per month, owner-developer Albanese Organization is marketing green features as amenities that enhance residents’ health and well-being. So far, tenants have been buying. But when interviewed by the New York Times, most said that green features were not the main attraction, raising questions about how developers will respond if they do not see strong consumer demand for green products materialize. Positioning green features as amenities also reinforces the notion that they are expendable or only for the rich. Greenwashing–corporations’ use of green building to burnish their poor environmental records–is another twist on green marketing. Joel Towers cites Ford Motor Company, which has implemented a number of green strategies at its River Rouge plant, including a LEED-certified visitor center and the world’s largest vegetated roof. “Ford has made numerous public statements about the negative environmental impact of SUVs, and their River Rouge project represents the best in adaptive thinking,” Towers says. “But in the end, Ford is still making gas-guzzling, greenhouse-gas-producing vehicles. When they stop doing that, their claim to environmental leadership will have more credibility.”

Towards Ecological Design

As a system that rewards developers for acting responsibly in an economy that encourages just the opposite, LEED fills an important niche in the green building world. While recognizing the incredible change LEED has achieved in a short time, it is also important to acknowledge what a system based on current economic priorities cannot do. LEED does not grow out of the environmental needs of local ecosystems or communities. It doesn’t make developers responsible for the full cost of pollution, resource extraction, waste disposal, and other ecological consequences of building. And it doesn’t go beyond low environmental impact design to offer more positive, holistic design principles.

What would it mean to advance beyond LEED–and our current political economy–and toward what David Orr calls “ecological design”? Bill McDonough describes a “second industrial revolution” that will eliminate the concept of waste, resulting in factories whose products are as ecologically benign as cherry blossoms. Orr envisions political action that will reign in global capital and re-exert local control over markets and ecosystems. Neither of these visions is practical under the current system, but they are possible, should we choose to pursue them. This kind of visionary thinking about sustainability is a necessary complement to practical strategies like LEED. Ideas like these can change our sense of what is possible, capture public imagination, and encourage debate about what course we should take once LEED succeeds in making green building commonplace.