LEED Competitor

New Rating System Targets Commercial Construction

by Diane Greer

A new competitor - or supplement - to the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard is trying to break into the commercial construction market.

The Green Globes system, adopted by the Green Building Initiative of Portland, Ore., came online domestically last year, and some in the building industry are gauging its potential as either an alternative to LEED or as a tool to use alongside the popular certification program.

The Web-based Green Globes system is designed as an interactive tool with eight questionnaires covering project stages from initiation to commissioning. Within each stage, the system groups questions into seven environmental performance categories, while also supplying reports that offer suggestions to users for enhancing the sustainability of a project.

"The interactive reports become a learning tool linking to documentation and research, especially where you are deficient," said Harvey Bryan, a professor in the Arizona State University College of Design and board member of the Green Building Initiative, which was formed in 2004 by the National Association of Homebuilders.

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The organization licensed Green Globes in the United States last year, tapping into the program that has roots in the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, a sustainable design evaluation tool first developed in the United Kingdom and later brought to Canada, where it was eventually shaped into the Green Globes format.

It remains unclear whether the market views Green Globes as a rival to LEED or as a supplementary tool. Sam Missimer, director of sustainable design at Venezia and Associates, an architectural firm based in New Brunswick, N.J., said he views the two systems as complements.

"It is an adjunct to LEED," said Missimer, who has proposed using Green Globes to a client on one of his projects. "The two are not mutually exclusive. There are cost factors and attributes of the two programs that are quantitatively different. I think the two can coexist."

But Ward Hubble, executive director of the Green Building Initiative, is eager to point out how the systems are different.

"There is a lot of room in the marketplace and a need for workable solutions for mainstream builders," Ward added.

That focus on "mainstream builders" comes in response to the U.S. Green Building Council's strategy to position LEED to serve the higher end of the building market on the belief that the top will blaze a trail for the rest of the industry.

"LEED is focused on the top 25 percent of the market," said Michelle Moore, USGBC's vice president of community and communications. "LEED is a tool for market transformation. It sets the bar for the industry."

In contrast, Bryan said Green Globes targets the remaining 75 percent.

"That end of the market really needs to be brought up to speed on the reasons to build green and the tools," he added.

Another sign that the initiative views LEED as a competitor is its efforts to lobby government bodies against choosing a single green building standard, and it recently succeeded in getting the federal government to adopt a policy that states 18 federal agencies will be "rating system-neutral." More than a dozen municipalities and states, including New York, already have adopted LEED as a specific benchmark for green building standards.

Hubble also said Green Globes stands apart from LEED because it doesn't require project teams to produce specialized documentation, but instead relies primarily on standard construction documents and onsite verification. Hubble said this avoids the cost of producing and tracking extra certification forms.

Another differentiating trait is that Green Globes incorporates credits for "life cycle analysis," a methodology of assessing long-range environmental "costs" of a particular product by accounting for resource and energy consumption and waste accumulation, among other factors, said Wayne Trusty, a GBI board member and president of Athena Institute, a Canada-based nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable design.

USGBC is considering how to add life cycle analysis to LEED, but is proceeding deliberately because of a lack of industry-recognized evaluation standards, Moore said. She added that the effort is not in response to Green Globes.

"We really do not know much about them," Moore said. "Our position with regard to other green building standards in general is that there are important questions - who is developing the standard, where is the funding coming from, and what is their track record?"

Whether they are competitors or not, Green Globes and LEED have similarities and differences in format and application.

Like LEED, Green Globes allows projects to earn points, with ratings determined by the percentage of points earned. Green Globes is based on a 1,000-point scale, and users can gain one to four "globes" for levels of certification that would be roughly equivalent to the four rating categories of LEED, Hubble said.

Also like LEED, Green Globes offers certification for projects, with an initial access fee of $500, similar to the $450 LEED registration fee. While LEED has a pricing scale that can charge anywhere from $1,250 to $17,500 for certification, the most recent Green Globes fee was $4,000.

The Green Globes third-party certification includes a conditional verification at the construction documents stage and a final verification, with onsite inspection.

Green Globes also is available as a voluntary, non-certification tool, said Greg Bergmiller, LEED project manager for S/L/A/M Collaborative, a Glastonbury, Conn., architect. He is trying out the system on a recently completed project that his firm designed, the 62,000-sq.-ft. Pfizer Clinical Research Unit in New Haven, Conn., a building that is already seeking LEED certification.

"One of the nice things about Green Globes is that when you are done filling in the online survey, it gives you quick turnaround on the results and nice charts to share with the client," he added.

Bergmiller said Green Globes also offers more chances for partial credit. He cited daylight exposure at Pfizer's building as an example, where 89 percent of regularly occupied space has outside views - just shy of a 90 percent LEED threshold to get an extra point, but enough for partial Green Globes credit.

Additional research by Tom Stabile.