You can't prescribe something green and then become green. Specifying a green chair does not mean you are green - it just means you bought a new chair that has sustainable features like recycled content or non-horrible toxins. If you want to be greener, it is probably better to not buy a new chair at all and therefore you are using less virgin materials or throwing away more old stuff into the landfills.
There are several points in LEED that have an intent around impacting the environment less. In Sustainable Sites, you can earn a point by locating your building on a brownfield site. The intent is that you are cleaning something up AND putting less pressure to use undeveloped land. In Water Efficiency, you can earn a point by using high efficiency irrigation technology or using captured water to irrigate. The intent is to limit or eliminate the use of potable water for irrigation. In Energy & Atmosphere, you can earn a point for increasing your energy performance to reduce environmental impacts of using excessive energy. In Materials & Resources, you can earn a point for recycled content of building products with the intent on boosting the demand for products with recycled content and decreasing demand for products that extract and process new virgin materials. See a trend? You can earn points by selecting things that preserve land, water and resources.
According to Cornell University, an average of one pound of drywall ends up in a landfill for each square foot of drywall built in initial construction. The EPA estimates that 155 lbs of material waste is generated for every square foot of built out space - and we demolish 1.75 billion square feet of existing building space a year. So how can the USGBC not acknowledge movable walls, or plug and play power or removable access floors or modular carpet tiles or sound masking or indirect lights as terrific strategies?
The manufacturers call these behavior - changing tools. If you use the products, they are actually probably more effective for the second time around LEED process because you would be reusing a huge portion of existing building materials, diverting scads of trash from landfills etc.
I found it wonderful that DIRTT, KI and Haworth joined forces as manufacturers to work on the USGBC to recognize behavior changing tools as huge parts of green building and green using of buildings. Good for them! Collaborative, innovative, sustainably focused and interesting.
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Anne your posts are getting better and better - very well thought out - you neeed a bigger audience. Start linking words, text, ideas to other sites - this will help generate traffic you also need to start adding keywords at the end of each post. I used to do this for you - but you can easily learn to do it yourself. I believe the blogger site has some tutorial info it's easy to do - learn how. Also have whoever is your front office person start emailing bimonthly notices to your client database with a link taking them to your blog. (engage your graphic artist to make them appealing & add something catchy to the subject line to challenge them to open it).
That's all - hope all is well.
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