Shades of green: LEED certification may be flawed, but even critics concede it's not wasted energy.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: PLANET-PROFIT REPORT - Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design

If you could take all the press releases written about LEED green building certification and recycle them, you would end up with an ecologically correct pile of paper that would reach from Denver to the moon.

If you could capture all the energy expended on hyping LEED, you could light Denver through some time in the next century.

If you believe its press, LEED certification is the biggest development in renewable, sustainable, Planet Earth-saving this side of Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize.

It's hard to avoid hype and spin about LEED, aka Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, defined as "a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings."

LEED is so popular among the designing community that Denver-based Barker Rinker Seacat Architecture has created games based on Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy to help train architects seeking to take the LEED accreditation exam.

"The test is not impossible, but you do have to study for it," says BRS associate Heidi Spaly, herself a LEED-accredited architect. LEED is not the be-all and end-all of modern architecture, she says, but, "It is a good jumping-off point, something that is so well known and that has been implemented over and over, so that it is raising the bar."

Read the newspapers, buy the hype and it would seem as though LEED building certification is taking over the architecture and construction businesses. That's because LEED certification is the one way for publicists to guarantee what otherwise might be just another ho-hum real estate project will receive favorable attention from the press, the public and potential tenants.

One of the bigger problems LEED certification faces these days is that its hype and hope have vastly surpassed its accomplishments. Colorado contains just 43 LEED-certified commercial buildings, with another 150-plus in the pipeline. Nationally, about 1,000 commercial buildings have been certified, with another 13,000-plus in the pipeline. Perhaps 3 percent of all new buildings are LEED-certified, according to a couple of sources, which is more than zero and less than a final triumph.

Yet, "We've been tracking these projects ever since we've had these projects in Colorado," says Tom Hootman, who doubles as director of sustainability and senior associate with Denver-based RNL architecture and USGBC's Colorado chapter.

RNL just moved into a new 44,000-square-foot downtown Denver space, for which it plans to pursue LEED Gold level certification.

"If you look at the LEED-registered products projects today, two years from now that will be the approximate number of certified projects," Hootman says. "That's been the trend. Now, not every single certified project becomes registered, of course; some drop out. But it's an exponential growth curve."

And, hype in itself does not guarantee that the object of all the spin is without value. Just because something is propagandized ad infinitum doesn't mean it is wrong.

DEFINING LEED

So what is LEED certification? And what is its importance to Colorado's real estate development, particularly commercial development? Finally, is it the real thing or the sustainable version of cubic zirconia?

Answers follow, one at a time.

LEED certification is a designation bestowed on buildings by the nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council, or USGBC, through the use of the LEED Green Building Rating System, which it modestly calls "the national benchmark for high-performance green buildings" and "a road map for measuring and documenting success for every building type and phase of a building life cycle."

LEED was launched in 2000 The rating system bestows four levels of certification: certified, silver, gold and platinum, depending on how many rating points a building scores and can demonstrate through extensive documentation. Sixty-nine points is the maximum. The point system comprises six categories: innovation and design process (with the potential for 5 points); sustainable sites (14 points); energy and atmosphere (17 points); water efficiency (5 points); materials and resources (13 points); indoor air quality (15 points).

LEED also accredits architects and others who pass a test that enables them to post "LEED AP," that is, "LEED accredited professional" after their names.

Plenty of builders, of course, say their projects have met LEED standards for years. Now, however, they feel marketplace pressure to certify.

Curt Fentress, principal of Denver-based Fentress Architects, says, "We...