Taking the LEED
Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Elaine Misonzhnik
For example, office buildings are required to reduce their water consumption by up to 30 percent to earn certification points. But water use at offices is limited to bathrooms and kitchens, notes Grainger. Supermarkets, by contrast, need water to regularly clean produce and comply with health codes, greatly increasing usage and making it harder to cut down. As a result, in the LEED retail guidelines the GBC will exempt fixtures whose flow rates are regulated by health codes from the reduction requirements.
The program will also adapt its daylighting requirements to retail properties. At the moment, GBC requires from 75 percent to 90 percent daylighting quotas for other commercial buildings. In an office building, that requirement can be easily satisfied through the installation of extra windows on each floor. But the necessity for plenty of shelving space and increased security measures at one- or two-story stores makes adding extra windows impractical. To solve the dilemma, GBC will encourage retailers to use kitchen/back of the house areas to provide extra daylighting with windows and skylights, according to Nick Shaffer, retail sector coordinator with the agency. “Retail center developers, in order for them to get credit for core and shell certification…will have to consider the back of house when assessing the viability of achieving the daylighting credits,” he adds. “This potentially could have a large impact on the design of shopping centers.”
The GBC will also tailor LEED transportation guidelines for retailers. The challenge stems from the fact that municipal planning departments dictate parking requirements and usually call for about five parking spaces for every 100,000 square feet of retail, says Grainger. So retailers have little leeway. To account for that, under LEED for Retail, chains will gain points by providing bicycle parking spaces and preferred parking spaces for fuel-efficient cars, encouraging employees to carpool to work and offering delivery services, which will reduce the volume of car traffic to and from stores.
At the same time, the program will make it harder for retailers to earn certain points easily gained by office space users. In an office building, most of the waste comes from paper and food rather than a laundry list of other materials, says Burrelsman, which simplifies recycling efforts. Retailers, on the other hand, deal with a much greater variety of waste products, including paper and plastic packages, hangers and food cartons. As a result, to earn points for waste management, they will have to undergo waste audits, identifying their top five recyclable waste streams by either weight or volume. And if the available recycling services can't handle all that waste, the retailer will have to come up with alternative ways to re-use it. “That's a case of LEED certification being a little bit tougher on retailers, but more appropriate, so being LEED-certified means more,” Burrelsman says.
Retailers will also face more complicated guidelines for energy consumption reduction. Instead of simply optimizing the use of their lighting and air-conditioning systems, the way other space users do, retail chains will be divided into two categories — those that sell food and those that don't. Because the grocery sellers rely on heavy refrigeration, they will have to reduce their entire energy load by using more energy-efficient refrigeration and storing equipment, according to Grainger.
That has already led to pressure from Wal-Mart, Target and others for electric appliance manufacturers to produce “greener” products. “They are banding together and saying, ‘We've got 300 stores we'll do next year and we are on track to improve our energy performance and you've got to beat what you are doing right now,’” Grainger says.
Though retailers are certainly excited about the prospect of sector-specific LEED certification, perhaps the most influential development coming from the GBC will be LEED Volume, which will cut out the need to certify each store individually. Just to manage the process can cost a store operator anywhere between $75,000 and $100,000, on top of LEED registration fees, according to Grainger. But with LEED Volume certification, only the prototype store will need to go through the complete certification process — each subsequently built property will just need to be developed according to the set standard. As of late August, GBC pre-certified seven applicants for LEED Volume.
Many retailers have expressed interest in instituting measures that could lower operating costs, but want proof that LEED certification in itself will be worth their while in dollar terms. That might come if consumers become aware of LEED certification and what it stands for, says Eric Anderson, a senior associate with MulvannyG2. As the GBC works to improve its guidelines, LEED certification might gain the kind of brand power necessary to get retailers' attention.
“I think we are all insanely happy that LEED is on the scene because it has given more credibility to the environmentally sustainable [movement],” Anderson says.
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