One Thing LEEDs To Another

Hello my fancy friends! Friday, April 22nd is Earth Day - and we celebrate the earth everyday in this house, but especially on Earth day, take a minute to appreciate all the beauty that surrounds us. You can hug a tree if you want, or you can even just identify a tree that lives near you. Here in New York City we have a great website called the Street Tree Map. On this website you can look at any location in the five boroughs, it operates just like Google or Apple Maps, and see the species and trunk diameter of any tree along the sidewalk. This website is maintained by the Parks Department and it has really been a mystery solver for me personally. I live in a tree-rich neighborhood and we have these massive trees, their trunks are around three and half feet in diameter, and every year towards the end of the summer, they shed their bark completely. It’s like a snake shedding it’s skin. There’s bark all over people’s yards, on the sidewalk, and in the street. The first time I saw it, I thought there was some kind of fungus causing the tree harm, but it turns out these are London Plane trees, which are similar to the sycamore. I was able to look this up on our handy dandy Street Tree Map, and this is actually the most common tree in all of New York City, but it also can be found in Australia, South Africa, and China. The bark shedding is a totally normal process that the tree goes through every year and it’s actually how the tree cleans itself from pests and pollution. So it’s basically giving itself an annual chemical peel. Nature is so smart! My point is, there are so many ways we can connect with our amazing planet on Earth Day that are easy, fun, and beneficial.

On this podcast, we are celebrating Earth Day this year by taking a closer look at the LEED rating systems for buildings. L-E-E-D is an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and you may have seen this word engraved on a round plaque outside your school, office, library, or other major building. It’s nice to see and goodness knows we love plaques on buildings, but what does it actually mean? And what’s more important - what are the principles and concepts that you can take to heart and incorporate into your home to make it more sustainable. I’m willing to bet there are things you’re already doing that would earn your home plenty LEED points. We’re going to break down the process of getting a building certified, the history of the LEED system, and even a little bit of steaming hot criticism. So roll out the jute carpet and get yourself a cup of organic hand picked herbal tea, because we are going through a crash course in sustainability of the built environment.

But first let’s talk about the color of the week. Spring blossoms are making way for brand new baby leaves on the trees. -This shade of green is much more energetic and vibrant then the typical full grown leaf. This yellow-green, almost chartreuse hue is captured in Pantone 583. This is one of my favorite colors for accent or arm chairs in the living room, it’s a great color for storage pieces like credenzas, and if you really want every one to know you’re fearless, try painting your front door Sherwin William SW6703 Frolic. This color looks awesome with a grounding navy blue background and plus your glowing personality.

Before I really dive into things I want to put in the caveat that I am actively working to over simply all of this information. This is by no means a podcast that will prepare you to take the LEED exam. My goal is to give you a general understanding of this classification system, without all the gory details, because the reality is that LEED is complex system with its own lexicon, definitions, and coding; but you don’t have to absorb any of that to understand the big ideas of LEED. Goodness knows I am very selective about what information I hold in my brain, and you can be too.

One thing that’s important to know about the world of interior design and architecture is that it leans heavily on assumed standards and universally accepted consistencies. For instance, ask a designer how high the seat of a chair should be and they’ll likely say between 17-19 inches. Why? Because that’s a height that accommodates a majority of body types comfortability. Part of the job of an interior designer is to commit many of these standards to memory. It isn’t just dimensions and proportions, it’s also practical material related anecdotes like all walls need bases or the more grout lines on a tile floor, the less slippery it is. In order to function efficiently, our industry relies on standards; basically so we can avoid reinventing the wheel on every project, although that certainly comes up in other areas, try as we might. 

So in 1993, a group of architects came together in the interest of standardizing specific environmentally conscious design tactics. They formed the United States Green Building Council or the USGBC as a non-profit to champion sustainable design and building efforts. They had a few goals in mind when they set out to determine standards. Firstly, there was a need to change the way buildings were designed to lower energy consumption. Energy in a building is used through electric light, air conditioning, heating, and ventilation. Depending on the size of the building, and the types of systems installed, this can end up being a major cost for building owners; and it’s a big let-down when a client makes a huge investment to get a new building, only to be thrown off by their brand new electric bill.

The second is the health of building occupants - that’s us guys! This is coming off the heels of the 1980’s when the office building really took flight. It was all about getting lots of people in as little space as possible, and there wasn't an emphasis on things like access to daylight, views to the outside, or the impact that materials and their associated glues and sealants had on the air quality inside the building. There are buildings from 1980’s that are downright awful to be in, and identifying what those awful making factors were, and creating standards to counter act them, was critical.

Lastly, there is the idea of environmental responsibility. The construction industry is responsible for a hefty portion of the world’s carbon emissions, and the USGBC wanted to quantify ways to redefine the process of creating buildings to cut out needless waste. This included saving resources, reducing waste, and diverting it from landfills. We’ll talk about all the ways the materials we use have an impact on the well being of the planet, but the short story is, when in doubt, shop local.

With these goals in mind, over the span of roughly a decade, the USGBC created a few things - the LEED rating system for buildings, LEED accreditation of professionals, and the Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI), an independent third party that provides oversight on both project certification and professional accreditation. 

So great, these things come into existence, now they just needed to get designers and clients to buy into the whole thing. The LEED Steering Committee worked with other non-profits and particularly government agencies to refine the guidelines. Right from the beginning, LEED worked very closely with United States Federal Government to launch their first set of standards and rating system. My opinion on why LEED and the government have always been so tied at the hip is that the federal government has buildings in every major city in American, roughly 369 million square feet in almost 9,000 cities, so little cuts in the cost of the lighting bill start to add up, big time. In turn, different tax credits and incentives were offered to the private sector for adopting a LEED certification, and empire was born.

Now LEED has changed a lot over the pasted 20 years and especially in the last ten, so while I am not going to go into the super specific details of the credit point systems or all the different rating systems, I’m going to highlight the most pertinent things from specifically an interior design perspective. One big distinction I always like to call out is that buildings get LEED certification, while people aka professional get LEED accredited. I received my LEED accreditation in 2009 after studying for about two months and taking a multiple choice exam on a computer in a very tense testing facility. The majority of the exam was focused on memorizing the points system, and at that time there was only one type of accreditation. 

Today, there are all different levels of accreditation, starting with an entry test that gives one the title of LEED Green Associate. There are additional exams that give one the title of LEED Accredited Professional plus a speciality which could be construction, commercial interiors, operations, homes, or neighborhoods. If you want to go even further, after eight to ten years you can apply to become a LEED Fellow, which is a recognition of excellence and accomplishment in the sustainable built environment.

Being a LEED Accredited Professional, or AP for short, of any level shows dedication and commitment to your industry. It tells prospective employers, clients, and colleagues that you value environmental considerations and your design will tend to reflect this, whether a project applies for LEED Certification or not. So, people are accredited and buildings are certified, let’s talk about the different types of certifications. 

Just like with the speciality exams, each project starts by selecting a specific LEED rating system - construction, commercial interiors, operations, homes, or neighborhoods. It’s straight forward, you just select the one that fits your project. For us, that ends up being either commercial interiors or homes. Then you’re given a long checklist of achievements that will give you a certain amount of points. At the end of the project, the points are totaled, and depending on how many you got, the projects is rated from simply certified, to silver, gold, or platinum.

In New York City, the energy codes are stringent enough that complying with them and throwing in a few recycled materials will get a project to Silver status pretty easily. In fact once material manufacturers started adjusting the content of their products to better align with LEED guidelines, the USGBC updated LEED standards to include even more requirements that were more challenging to achieve. While at first, this might seem like a frustrating move of the goalpost, the organization stated that LEED’s criteria were always meant to be in someways aspirational, and push the industry as a whole to strive for even greater sustainable measures.

So, what are these points are how can we get them? Many of them are related to things beyond an interior designer’s control - having a clean, efficient HVAC system, using sustainable energy sources, not building on a flood plane, dedicating a space for bicycle parking, and even things like being in a walkable neighborhood will earn you points. Access to public transpiration and community resources is great one too - the location of your space must be within a half mile of at least four of the following places - a post office, public library, clinic, school, daycare, recreation center, pharmacy, grocery store, bank, place of worship, or gym facility. Sounds like everything you could want. Having these types of support nearby naturally means those of us living or working in the building will rely far less on cars. 

Okay,  we’ve cracked through the shell of this episode, we are now to the deliciously sweet center where we get to talk about interior design! There are a few different point categories that revolve around material selection, and we’ve spoken about a lot of these ideas in previous episodes. First is using rapidly renewable materials - this is referring to the amount of time that a natural resource needs to grow from start to finish. A prime example is bamboo wood flooring, which can fully mature within ten years of being planted. Other woods take 40 plus years. Other beautiful choices include cork, natural rubber, and my favorite, linoleum! We can also look at the materials in our furniture like using wheat board panels instead of MDF, soy-based foam agents, and organic cotton and linen for fabrics. The idea is that we aren’t depleting resources that take hundreds of years to replenish, for instance the super popular Carrara marble is over 200 million years old, so if we go through the earth’s stock, we’re done for our lifetime. Where as linoleum, which is made from linseed oil, can be regrown and harvested after 5 months.

I mentioned buying local earlier, and LEED has found a way to quantify this concept. The goal is to use products and materials that are manufactured within 500 miles of your home or project. This can even be extended to closer to 1500 miles if the item is transported by train or an inland waterway, rather than freight or plane. This is actually one of the harder credits to achieve, considering we fancy design lovers are obsessed with beautiful things from across the ocean and on the other side of the globe, or even from the opposite coast. Plus, products tend to be made in clustered hubs around the world. Many carpets are made in Georgia, tile is prolific in Spain, and furniture’s hotspots are North Carolina and Michigan. As professional designers, we are always keeping running lists of local manufacturers or even various regional ones if we have out of town clients. It’s not likely every material is going to fit into this category, but you only need around 20% of the materials in your home to be local to get the LEED points. Try researching local and regional manufacturers, if you can find a resource for a big item like flooring or even paint that’s made locally, that’s a huge win.

When I buy food at the grocery store, I’m constantly checking ingredient labels for foods I like and ones I want to avoid. LEED pushes us to do the same thing with the materials we use in our spaces. There is a list of no-no materials to avoid like vinyl in its various forms. These can actually reduce the quality of the air we breath indoors as they emit that famous new car smell (which it turns out is not good to inhale), for months and even years after being installed.

Then there are materials we love to see like recycled content.  Rubber, glass, metal, plastic bottles, and fibers like nylon can all be recycled, and it’s very common for materials to contain a small amount of these. There is even the opportunity to get creative like the company Deckstool, that makes wall tiles out of old skate boards, it’s a very cool look. We love waste deferral!

 Okay so LEED is pretty cool, but it’s not without its share of criticism and rightfully so - all industry standards should be reviewed, analyzed and improved when possible. But the pipping hot green tea we are sipping today is served up with some good food for thought. One of the more prevalent criticisms I have heard of LEED is that there is not enough follow up on the energy performance of buildings after they have been built. So while there is a great focus on the design of the building there isn't someone going back and checking to see if the building is in fact performing as designed. Others have criticized the process for been too lengthy and ultimately just another series of paperwork that can exclude projects with tight deadlines and short timelines. 

Plenty of people feel that LEED’s criteria is not innovative enough. With the current climate crisis, the idea of having carpet made with 20% recycled plastic bottles can feel like a drop in the ocean. Others have noticed that for some companies, getting a LEED certification is much less about aligning with a sustainable ethos, as it is about public relations. There have been multiple instances of large organizations that have touted their brand new office’s LEED status, only to later uncover the offices were located miles away from sister locations or key resources, forcing employees to drive or commute more.

My opinion is that one of the best ways LEED could improve - offer exemptions on their fees to small businesses, non-profits, black-owned businesses, and B-Corps. LEED is not a free service. It takes time and money to get that shiny plaque, and that is often a dealbreaker for many clients. The number of true LEED projects I have worked on, I can count on one hand. The number of projects I've worked on where clients want to follow the guidelines LEED has set up without actually filing for LEED certification are a great many.

What do you think, is LEED worth it? Which one of the points are you most excited about? Leave a comment over on my latest instagram post and let me know! I love hearing from you. Until next time, water yourself, keep being awesome, and get outside once in while. Bye!