By Grey Lee
This is a guide for LEED® accredited professionals and eco-conscious individuals on how to apply the LEED® credit scorecard to their personal lives.
Why should only buildings benefit from the LEED® requirements? If we follow the LEED® guidelines so that our projects can hit silver, gold or even platinum, then why not apply those guidelines to our everyday lives? By applying the scorecard to our daily life, we demonstrate that LEED® is not just limited to buildings, but it is for everyone. It shows that we not only talk the talk but walk the walk.
My posts will be part personal journey, part advice column, and part standard by which we all live by. Living LEED® is for everyone, not just about me writing my personal reflections or giving advice. It is about you and your journey to your own personal silver, gold, platinum or even higher achievements! With this column, I declare a new standard that should be named as the EVERGREEN standard. Let’s be like the Evergreen Trees, who in their long fruitful lives, give us more than they take. So let us give back to the environment more than what we take from it.
For reference: the posts will follow LEED® for EB and NC, but to get to EVERGREEN level we will incorporate the other LEED® disciplines as Homes and CI whose credits cross pollinate. The choice of including LEED® for Homes is practical because it is where we spend much of our lives, in and around the home.
I call out to all my LEED® professionals and eco-conscious colleagues to contribute to credits that you have personally achieved and I will incorporate them here. I will try to write in each edition credits in the order they appear. This new Evergreen level doesn’t come with a prescribed checklistt uses the LEED® checklist as a reference to achieve a level greater than before.
Our first attempt at EVERGREEN standard is to achieve credits in the Sustainable Sites section .
In the current version of EB and CI you get a point for having a LEED® certified building. If you are living in a LEED® Certified building or Home, you are ahead of the curve. My townhome is not LEED® certified.
The best that I can do is go for Energy Star. Everyone needs to go here and learn as much as they can. If you can, register your existing or new home to get it up to Energy Star standards.
Not ready for Energy Star? Then consider Mass Save®. Here you can begin the journey to energy savings and dollar savings! Mass Save is chock full of rebate programs that will send you in an Evergreen direction!
There are many more components to Sustainable Sites. In the next few posts, I will try to incorporate the credits that directly affect us as people or credits that can be used in conjunction with people. Without infringing on USGBC or Energy Star copyrights, we will reflect on the credits and checklists that inspire an Evergreen Level of standard we can all live by.
Steve is a Holistic Design Professional at a large Boston-area design firm.
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