Green Buildings LEED Certification:

Many local or national institutions have put a variety of certification labels for green buildings (LEED, BREAMÒ, HQEÒ, Built Green, etc.), to help stakeholders guarantee a certain quality level and to promote best practices.

Maybe the most famous and well-established worldwide is the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. The United States Green Building Council (USGBC), a

national non-profit entity, developed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), a Green Building Rating System, used to rate new and existing commercial, institutional and high-rise residential buildings according to their environmental attributes

and sustainable features. The LEED system utilizes a list of 34 potential performance-based credits worth up to 69 points, as well as seven prerequisite criteria, divided into six categories:

· Sustainable Sites

· Water Efficiency

· Energy and Atmosphere

· Materials and Resources

· Indoor Environmental Quality

· Innovation and Design Process

LEED allows the project team to choose the most effective and appropriate sustainable building measures for a given location and/or project. These points are then tallied to determine the appropriate level of LEEDÒ certification. A full description of the LEED credits can be found on www.usgbc.org/leed/

Four levels of LEEDÒ certification are possible depending on the number of criteria met. They indicate increasingly sustainable building practices:

· LEED Certified 26-32 points

· LEED Silver 33-38 points

· LEED Gold 39-51 points

· LEED Platinum 52+ points

There is a general perception that LEED is becoming the standard for US green building design and probably for the world.