Climate co-benefits of green building standards: water, waste and transportation

ABSTRACT

This paper quantifies the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions co-benefits associated with water, waste and transportation usage in certified green commercial office buildings in California. The study compares the measured values of water, waste and transportation usage self-reported by office buildings certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system for Existing Building Operations and Maintenance (LEED EBOM) to baseline values of conventional California office buildings. The green buildings in the LEED EBOM dataset produced 50% less GHGs due to water consumption than baseline buildings, 48% less due to solid waste management, and 5% less due to transportation. If applied to the entire California office building stock, performance typical of the certified green buildings would save 730,038 MgCO₂e/yr (metric tonnes) from transportation, 87,601 MgCO₂e/yr from water, and 45,280 MgCO₂e/yr from waste, for a total potential savings of about 862,920 MgCO₂e/yr relative to conventional construction. In addition, buildings earning additional credits for specified performance thresholds for water and waste in the LEED EBOM code attained performance levels even higher than required by the code provisions, suggesting that such code provisions in other contexts may help incentivize larger GHG emissions reductions than anticipated. Specific recommendations are made for building standards and certification schemes.

KEYWORDS:

• building assessment systems
• building operation
• environmental assessment
• green buildings
• greenhouse gases (GHG)
• LEED transport
• waste management
• water

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dana Papke Waters of the California Air Resources Board and Courtney Smith of the California Energy Commission, and the research assistance of John Goins, Michelle Gonzales, Bin Chen and Joe Zissman. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the US Green Building Council (USGBC) and its research director, Chris Pyke.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

William Eisenstein http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6279-318X

Gwen Fuertes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6227-4141

Soazig Kaam http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3603-7644

Kimberly Seigel http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4440-2733

Ed Arens http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5961-9690

Louise Mozingo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8824-7654

Notes

1 The name of this rating system has changed a number of times and is now known as LEED O&M: Building Operations and Maintenance. This report uses the name that applied to the versions of the rating system that provided the data used herein.

2 The labelling, description and point distribution of these credits varies slightly between versions 2008 and 2009, but because this analysis is based on the actual reported performance data and not the points received under LEED EBOM, these differences are largely ignored in this study. The numbering conventions from the 2009 version are use here.

3 Some LEED certifications are kept confidential upon agreement by the building owner and the USGBC; these buildings were not available for analysis in this study.

4 As a research team member also served as a USGBC Research Program intern, she was able to collaborate with USGBC staff and obtain access to portions of the online credit database that are not publicly accessible. Access to the data was accompanied by a responsibility to respect and enforce USGBC policies with respect to data aggregation and privacy, with which the research team complied.

5 See www.ghgprotocol.org/.

6 Irrigation values are expressed per square foot of building rather than per square foot of irrigated area, to maintain comparability with indoor and cooling tower usage.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the California Air Resources Board (ARB) [contract number 11–323].