5 Ways a LEED Building can lose its Green Promise

By Maric Munn, P.E. LEED AP

Say your sustainability policy mandates that all new buildings achieve a LEED rating – Silver, Gold or even Platinum.  Does this mean that your new building will be green for the next 100 years?  Sadly, no.  My experience as a facility director for an educational institution engaged in building a new campus taught me the 5 main ways a building can lose its green potential throughout its life:

1. Design phase “Value Engineering” exercises which cost-cuts out a building’s green attributes.

2. A hasty turnover process from Construction to Operations that resembles a “toss the keys over the fence” exercise that leaves building operators with a steep learning curve while under pressure to open the new building.

3. Ongoing operations driven by crisis management and unscheduled maintenance rather than a consistent evaluation and data driven improvement of building energy and comfort parameters.

4. An inadequate program to address end of life equipment renewal leading to declining efficiency and danger of abrupt failure.

5. Finally, brain drain from the tidal wave or retirements happening in facilities operations which results in losing the institutional knowledge of how to keep buildings humming along.

 All of these issues are difficult to address, but creating a building that will continue to keep its green promise throughout its lifetime is doable with the cooperation of the design, construction, and operations teams.  This is incredibly important work as we race to draw down our greenhouse gas emissions before catastrophic climate impacts become the norm.

 In the upcoming weeks, I will tackle each of these areas in more depth and provide ideas on how to address them.  In the meantime, I would love to hear back from you on any success you have had in figuring out how to keep your buildings green.