LEED should recognize all credible North American wood certification programs

According to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system is supposed to provide “building owners and operators a concise framework for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions.”

While admirable in theory, in practice USGBC has turned its LEED rating systems into mechanisms for discriminating against wood products generally--and U.S. produced wood products specifically--despite overwhelming evidence of wood’s benefits as both a sustainable building material and its ability to sequester carbon, one of the leading measures in the mitigation of greenhouse gases.  The USGBC’s attitude toward wood products ultimately punishes workers in the U.S. forest products industry and undermines the broader effort to ensure that buildings are constructed with the most environmentally responsible materials.

At a basic level, the LEED rating system simply does not recognize the positive attributes of renewable and sustainable wood products.  Through several of its specific credits, wood products are put at a significant disadvantage to competing and environmentally inferior building materials.

For example, the LEED rating system does not require any form of certification for cement used in construction.  Yet the cement industry, which produces a vital ingredient for concrete used in construction, is responsible for approximately 5 percent of all carbon emissions globally.  Further, the steel industry is permitted to publish an annual average percentage of recycled content and have it applied across all steel building materials.

By contrast, it is proposed that for forest certification programs to be recognized by LEED, they must meet a myriad of benchmarks established to measure their environment, social, and energy metrics.  At the core of those proposed benchmarks is an agenda for forest certification that effectively excludes the two largest sustainable forest management systems in the U.S.

As now written, LEED provides a specific credit for forest products that have only been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), but no credits for wood products certified to the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) Program, American Tree Farm System (ATFS), or Canadian Standards Association (CSA) even though these three programs are endorsed by the International Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC) and account for more than 173 million acres of forestland in North America.

This discriminatory approach creates false markets, hidden behind the perception of environmental necessity, lacks science, and actually falls hardest on employees in the forest products industry—60 percent of FSC-certified wood comes from outside of the United States and Canada, supporting jobs overseas.

The American Wood Council (AWC) and its members are committed to reducing the environmental impact of buildings by encouraging energy-efficient, environmentally responsible choices during the design and building process.  But we believe that we can achieve this goal and support economic opportunity here at home by including wood products from credible and sustainable forestry programs in the U.S. and Canada.  The LEED standard can be a central component of that effort, but to do so it must become a more credible green building rating system itself.

To that end, USGBC can establish greater acceptance for LEED by simply recognizing the environmental benefits provided by the use of wood products.  Wood is among the most energy efficient of all building materials, storing significant amounts of carbon and facilitating ease of design and construction, while providing inherent energy-saving performance.  Yet at this time, when only 10 percent of the world’s forests are sustainably certified in any manner, USGBC continues to inexplicably tie its rating systems to the imperceptible differences between North American certification programs, requiring only wood to prove its environmental bona fides while competing materials do not.  In order to have a practical effect, USGBC needs to get more sustainable wood into the building environment, not less.

Rather than arbitrarily demand certification from only wood products, LEED’s standard developers should rely more on objective, scientific criteria based on life-cycle impacts.  The use of objective criteria in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can help ensure a building rating system or standard will evaluate materials on an equal basis, will yield consistent results, and avoid arbitrary thresholds.  LCA also helps emphasize environmental impact measures rather than cost, appropriate baselines and measures of improvement, and creates the ability to compare buildings in different locations on equal terms.  USGBC has said they will incorporate an LCA for building materials and we encourage them to expedite the process that will give LCA full recognition in LEED, not just as a pilot program.

Making these key changes to the USGBC’s LEED standard will support important progress on our common goal of improving the sustainability and energy efficiency of the design and building process while supporting critical American jobs.

Robert Glowinski is President of the American Wood Council (AWC). AWC is the voice of North American traditional and engineered wood products, representing over 60 percent of the industry.