Making Green From Building Green
Massachusetts is no stranger to green building, with nearly 300 LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)-certified projects and more than 400 LEED-certified homes dotting its landscape and an additional 600 projects in the pipeline.
Massachusetts is part of a community of more than 37,000 commercial and institutional projects worldwide helping to transform the market toward sustainability, all the while saving money, energy and helping create millions of American jobs.
Dollars & Cents
Local builders, project owners and managers aren’t simply using LEED as a guideline — which is much like sitting through class all semester but not taking the final exam. They are pursuing LEED certification in order to obtain the third-party verification that the green building strategies employed are designed and constructed, operated and maintained as intended — which is what the industry lacked — and was the reason for the development of LEED in the first place.
The confidence that comes with LEED certification is what makes it worth it, and why projects large and small, from College of the Holy Cross’ Haberlin Hall to Shaw’s supermarket in Worcester have gone through the process. Those project owners can tell you that LEED equates to more than a plaque on the wall — it’s proof positive that their buildings are designed and built to improve performance across the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, carbon dioxide emissions reduction, indoor environmental quality, stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts. When it earned LEED Gold, Clark University’s Lasry Center for Bioscience was using 34 percent less energy and 31 percent less water than other comparable campus buildings.
So does it cost more to be LEED certified? The answer is always unequivocally no: building green does not have to cost a penny more than building a conventional project. And if there are any additional upfront costs, projects have shown that they average only 1 to 5 percent of a project’s overall budget — costs that are quickly recouped through energy and water savings within the first one to three years of operation.
For that modest investment, studies have shown that a typical LEED-certified project delivers an astounding return while commanding top-market rents and increased lease velocity, and attracting Class-A tenants. How do we know? One million square feet of construction space is certifying to LEED standards each day across the world.
Peter Templeton is president of Washington, D.C.-based
Green Building Certification Institute. For more information visit www.gbci.org.
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