When is LEED MIS-LEEDING?

LEED = Letting Environmental Emotions Dominate?

Why is it we have to have programs that are designed to replace good engineering and common sense? This is nothing new. We used to just call it engineering.

Even as a young lad, I recall my dad engineering a large paper mill almost 40 years ago and he was fretting over choices of initial cost versus efficiency and where the cross-over points and return on investment. This was just as important to him and his customer back then as it is now.

What is really happened is that we now create bureaucracies to mandate what we would have done anyways. Ludicrous.

LEED is a mixed bag. On one side it beats its chest, asking all to think and build green. On the other side, it appears the emporer has no clothes.

In order to simplify things so bureaucrats and paper shufflers can understand and keep score, it has degraded to a point system that bases an overall rating based on boxes that can be checked off. If you can gimmick the number of boxes checked without spending too much money, you will be "Green Certified" and can officially brag the fact to try to get higher lease rates for your property. The final object is not good engineering, but looking good to the unwashed masses.

Overly cynical? Maybe.

This seems true. I work as a design Civil for a large corporation, and we have LEEDS certification people. It has become a large profit center apparently. The best i can see is all of the LEEDs personnel are otherwise unemployable at the pay scale they currently receive. I have met about a dozen of them, they all work for the "environmental" planning divisions. They all seemed to have educations in things such as landscape architecture, planning, ecological/environmental biology, business administration, even one in sociology. They seem to treat conformance as if we are trying to find a way to make what they can understand of a facilities design into a loose term.

This is the case with all real improvements for society vs the law ,industry does what least it has to ,to save money without regard to actual impact, the fault is always with the law and law makers, for example in florida we get charged 1 dollar recycle fee when we return a used tire not when we buy a new one so what happens to the trailers full of tires that would cost 500 dollars to take to recycle they get dumped illigally , you can blame the individual but if the law was corrected there would be no incentive to dump instead of recycle. same with LEED points if they are given out to stuff that is not green that is the certification error, but we need the credits and the system to get stuff done that would never get into buildings. it just needs constant updating to work well.

Unfortunately it is going to be a while yet before true green systems are the norm.

http://www.rexxindustrialparts.com

well if you go with structural insulated panels you have less thermal bridges,but there too lies pitfall's on cost that the energy policy act doesn't cover. just too have a Leed certified building is not enough. Its almost like notches in ones belt. I feel its a good idea that needs to be rethought.