What is LEED?

LEED, or Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, is a certification program that recognizes sustainable design and construction. The program is run by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC).

This article from Green Building Elements provides a concise overview of what LEED is and how projects earn LEED certification.

What types of projects can be certified under LEED?

There are several different LEED rating systems for different types of projects.

Building Design + Construction (BD+C) applies to commercial buildings of at least 1,000 square feet that are being newly constructed or undergoing a major renovation.

Interior Design + Construction (ID+C) applies to commercial projects of at least 250 square feet that are complete interior fit-outs.

Building Operations + Maintenance (O+M) applies to existing commercial buildings of at least 1,000 square feet undergoing improvement or minor renovations.

Homes applies to new single-family homes and multi-family housing of up to six stories that are defined as “dwelling units” by all applicable codes.

Neighborhood Development(ND) applies to new development or redevelopment projects, which can be commercial, residential, or mixed-use, that include at least 2 habitable buildings and are no larger than 1,500 acres.

How do projects achieve certification?

A project must meet all the LEED Prerequisites to achieve certification. For LEED v4, a building must be in a permanent location on existing land, must use reasonable boundaries to evaluate the project, and must meet the size requirements for the appropriate LEED rating system.

Each LEED rating system is made up of credit categories such as water efficiency, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and sustainable sites. A project can earn LEED credits in each category, and the total number of credits earned determines the level of certification.

A project must earn a minimum number of credits to be LEED Certified at all, and additional credits will earn the project a LEED Silver, LEED Gold, or LEED Platinum Certification.

Learn more about the LEED Certification Process.

How does a project earn LEED credits?

There are nine categories in which a project can earn LEED credits.

You can find all of the available LEED credits on the USGBC website. Select the appropriate rating system at the top of the page, and then search for a particular credit or browse the list by category.

USGBC offers three levels of recognition for green building professionals

When your instructor doesn’t care how you cite as long as you do cite, make sure to include the information someone would need to find your source on their own. A citation for a case study might look like this:

Cite It Where You Use It

Every time you use a quotation, a piece of information, or an image from another source, cite the source right where you use it, whether it’s on your project board or in your paper, job book or presentation.

Include enough information to allow your audience to figure out which source (from your complete list at the end) you’re citing. For example, if you use the case study in the example above, the citation on your board or presentation slide might be “Andover Classrooms”.

Check out this tutorial on Citing Sources Informally for more guidelines and examples to informally cite every source you use - whether it’s a book, magazine, website, blog or video - and avoid plagiarism.