The market shift towards green buildings over the last several years has established new practices and paradigms in the building industry.  The changing market for green buildings and the desire to assess the performance of those buildings has led to the emergence of a bona fide evaluation tool for assessing the “green-ness” of projects.  This tool is the LEED® rating system.  Created by the United States Green Building Council and now adopted (with minor modifications) by the Canada Green Building Council, it has rapidly become the de facto “continental” – if not “global” – tool for measuring environmental performance.  LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) assesses a building project’s performance in 5 broad categories which include site development, energy and water efficiency, material/resource efficiency and occupant satisfaction.  It is a far from perfect tool but so rapid and widespread has been the adoption of LEED® that the pace has surprised even the most fervent green building advocates.

Success, of course, breeds imitators and the last 5 years has seen many BC municipalities’ adopt their own “sustainability guidelines” many of which are thinly disguised versions of the LEED® rating system.  This is LEED® “by stealth”.  Municipalities wish to encourage building owners, developers, consultants and builders to adopt more sustainable construction practices but because LEED® is constitutionally a “voluntary” standard, they stop short of mandating the adoption of LEED®.  This is, at least in part, because there is a cost to the owner/developer to register for LEED® and then to have an independent third party verify the level of performance through a certification process which costs several thousand dollars.

More insidious than the municipal approach of “LEED® by stealth” is the design and development industries’ adoption of “LEED® by association”.  As LEED® has increasingly become the currency of building sustainability, designers and developers (both wittingly and unwittingly) are seeking to gain market advantage by associating themselves with LEED®.  Expressions such as – “targeting LEED® certification” or “alignment with LEED®” are popping up on websites and “for sale/for lease” signs everywhere.  Both developers and designers are equally complicit in this abuse of the LEED® trademark.  LEED® is an “independent, third party system” whose viability and validity is directly attributable to its independence from either the designers or the developers of projects.  In decrying this misuse of LEED®, I often employ what I find to be a useful analogy about “organic produce”.  If – like me – it matters to you what food you put on the table for your children and you occasionally (or primarily) purchase organic food products, how would you feel about purchasing products from companies that were “targeting organic certification” or aligning their food production with “organic” practices?  Exactly.

LEED is far from perfect but it is evolving and it is the current standard of sustainable building measurement.  Beware of the pretenders “LEED by stealth” and “LEED by association”.