USGBC Seeks to Make LEED More Wood Friendly

Jessica Boehland

A new initiative from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) board of directors hopes to bring resolution to the prickly subject of wood in the LEED® Rating System. The timber industry has used its leverage to slow the adoption of LEED by state governments and federal agencies and has sponsored the introduction of a competing rating system, Green Globes™, to undermine LEED’s reach. “Wood has been a contentious topic for a number of years now,” board chair Kevin Hydes told EBN. “The board took a galvanizing approach to wanting to continue to demonstrate leadership and face these difficult issues head on,” he says.

The flagship LEED rating system, LEED for New Construction (LEED-NC), includes one point for the use of wood that is certified according to Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards and another point for the use of “rapidly renewable materials.” Other LEED rating systems have similar requirements. Wood from forestry operations that are not FSC-certified can be used in LEED buildings but does not contribute to the achievement of any LEED points.

USGBC has initiated several efforts over the past few years to resolve the wood dispute, including a proposal in the first public comment draft of LEED-NC, version 2.2, to modify LEED’s approach to wood, and a meeting of stakeholders that took place in September 2005 and launched the process of creating consensus guidelines for LEED-approved forestry certification programs. Faced with a lack of progress on the issue, the board established a task force, led by BuildingGreen’s Alex Wilson (note: GreenSource is a partnership between publisher McGraw-Hill Construction and BuildingGreen), to propose a solution. The council subsequently commissioned Wilson to prepare a white paper with recommendations.

Wood currently applies to only a single credit in LEED, but the ongoing debate “was threatening to distract from the overall agenda on green building,” reports Michelle Moore, vice president for community and communications at USGBC. “The board wanted to direct the question back into USGBC’s consensus process to resolve definitively,” she adds.

The USGBC board’s resolution, adopted unanimously, was to accept Wilson’s white paper, which proposes changes to two LEED credits, while referring the issue to USGBC’s LEED committees to develop a resolution with member and stakeholder participation. Any changes to the credits would ultimately have to be approved by member ballot.

The first change would expand the credit that currently provides a point for the use of “rapidly renewable materials” to include all biobased materials, including wood, as long as the wood is known to come from legal sources. The second change would expand the “certified wood” credit to include non-wood biobased materials that meet the highest standards of environmental performance, including waste agricultural fibers. In effect, wood certified under the timber-industry-endorsed Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) would count toward the achievement of a point under the first credit, while FSC-certified wood would count toward two points (one under each credit). In parallel with these changes, the paper recommends that USGBC continue the process of developing criteria by which certification programs can be evaluated for their applicability to either of these credits.

The changes are justified, according to the paper, by the fact that even mainstream forestry has a lower environmental impact than standard agricultural practices, so favoring short-cycle biobased materials under the rapidly renewable materials credit doesn’t make sense. This argument is supported by a report, commissioned by Wilson and written by environmental life-cycle assessment (LCA) expert Greg Norris, of Sylvatica, in North Berwick, Maine, that compares the environmental impacts of agricultural practices and forestry.

Whether this proposed solution will gain enough support from environmentalists to be approved by the membership remains to be seen. Michael Washburn, vice president of brand management for the U.S. office of FSC, is concerned about the lack of clarity regarding how this proposal fits with the stakeholder process coming out of the September 2005 meeting: “If this proposal is part of that process, it seems that the connection hasn’t been well established, and if it’s not part of that process, I’d be interested to know what the implications are for the process that we agreed to.”

The timber industry is optimistic. John Mechem, director of communications at the American Forest and Paper Association, acknowledges that his organization has lobbyists fighting the adoption of LEED by local and state governments. “I can’t say yet whether it would affect our plans for lobbying activities,” Mechem reports. “But we do what our members tell us,” he adds. One of those members is Potlach Corporation, whose director of public affairs, Lisa Stocker, said, “I’m very, very encouraged by this announcement.” Georgia-Pacific’s vice president of marketing in the Building Products Group, Alan Thielemann, echoed that sentiment, while adding, “We still think that there could be more recognition for wood as a renewable resource.”

Moore contends that satisfying one side or the other is not the real goal. In the end, the question USGBC will ask itself is not whether one side or the other is happy, she says, but whether the decision “is the right one for the organization and rings true with its core values.”

This article was produced by BuildingGreen, Inc.- www.buildinggreen.com

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