ASSESSING THE APPLICATION OF LEED REQUIREMENTS OF A HIGH-VOLUME PROJECT OWNER IN THE UNITED STATES

Construction project owners worldwide require compliance with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) green building rating system as a means to meet sustainability goals. Despite its popularity, the LEED certification process can still be cumbersome for project teams without clear guidance. This study focuses on a school district in the United States committed to certifying its high volume of new schools. The analysis includes understanding the efficacy of the district’s LEED requirements by comparing them to the final LEED scorecards of 16 completed projects. The results indicate an incompatibility between the owner’s required LEED credit targets and the actual outcomes, confirming that simply requiring LEED certification is insufficient to reach specific sustainability goals. The significance of this study is the identification of four strategies that owners with a high volume of construction projects can use to successfully facilitate and streamline the LEED certification process: (a) develop a targeted LEED scorecard, (b) create LEED documentation templates, (c) integrate LEED into specifications, and (d) align design guidelines with LEED goals.