Green building is growing up.

Published this spring by somewhat sympathetic sustainable-business advocates Auden Schendler of the Aspen Skiing Company and Randy Udall of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency in Aspen, Colo., the not-quite-broadside comes as the five-year-old LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program is becoming the default green-building standard in the U.S. and establishing beachheads internationally.

A small but high-profile list of building projects certified under LEED has attracted abundant media attention and generated significant buzz within the building community and beyond. LEED is also rapidly picking up endorsements from businesses, state and local governments, and federal agencies, and accrediting a fast-growing number of building-industry professionals — more than 20,000 at last count.

But, echoing a growing chorus in the green-building community, Schendler and Udall contend that LEED is in crisis. They fault the program’s cost, complexity, bureaucratic requirements, and what they characterize as a frequent disconnect between its emphasis on point allocation and actual environmental benefit.

LEED, We Have a Problem

The core 69-point LEED rating system addresses energy and water use, indoor air quality, materials, siting, and innovation and design. Buildings can earn basic certification or a silver, gold, or platinum designation depending on how many of the possible credits they rack up.

LEED-certified buildings are still about as rare as major wind farms in the U.S. So far, fewer than 300 projects have been certified, and about 2,200 have been registered, according to USGBC officials. Registration involves a fairly simple project description and a summary of the LEED credits the developer expects to earn, but actual certification requires thorough documentation, review, and commissioning, a process that can take many months and, some green-building practitioners argue, considerably drive up costs. LEED-registered projects accounted for just under half a percent of buildings constructed in the U.S. in 2000, and a little over 3.5 percent in 2003, according to USGBC officials. Those low percentages show how far LEED is from revolutionizing the building industry, critics say.

Many developers point to the expense of certification, rather than of green building itself, as a disincentive. The USGBC’s fees for registration range from $750 to $3,750, and certification runs from $1,500 to $7,500, depending on the size of the building. But the big costs come in the form of energy modeling, commissioning, and other requirements of certification; these can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, according to architects and developers.

“There is a significant added cost to certification,” Schendler said. He and Udall, who’ve each worked on multiple LEED projects, write that this can set up a zero-sum budgeting game, in which developers may forgo certification in favor of additional eco-friendly features. “In some cases it’s a question of photovoltaics or LEED,” he said.

Some critics also argue that basic certification is too low a hurdle to merit the green stamp of approval. They say developers can rack up the minimum number of needed points without going much beyond the requirements of local building codes and the efficiency standards of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

Pondering ways to make LEED better,
at the silver-certified Seattle Library.

Others note that LEED doesn’t guarantee energy efficiency, as certification can be gained without earning many or even any LEED points in the area. Some green-building advocates would like to see mandatory points for energy efficiency. A point system that weights a renewable-energy system about equal with a bike-storage room needs some refining, they argue.

Seth Kaplan, director of the Conservation Law Foundation’s Clean Energy & Climate Change Program, raises the concern that LEED doesn’t adequately address the siting of a building, which has impact on energy use, traffic, and pollution. “A building with a large parking lot that is full — on a fundamental level, it’s oxymoronic to call it a green building,” he said. A conventional building located in an already developed urban area is arguably more sustainable than a high-performance building in a previously undeveloped area, he noted. The CLF’s LEED-certified headquarters is located in the heart of Boston.

Some industry groups also dismiss the LEED system as burdensome and arbitrary. The National Association of Home Builders, which earlier this year rolled out its own green building guidelines, and the North American Coalition on Green Building, which represents manufacturing and trade associations, have worked to counter the influence of LEED, claiming that it lacks scientific rigor and smacks of undue regulation.

Still, interested parties from across the spectrum recognize that LEED is the dominant green-building standard, so it can’t be ignored. “It got to the point where if a project wasn’t LEED, no one knew it was green,” Schendler said. “It went from a kid brother upstart to an 800-pound gorilla.”

Shot Stuff

“We understand that as the definitive market leader we are the ones who are going to take those shots,” said Fedrizzi, who sounded a diplomatic tone in discussing the tensions around LEED.

The USGBC’s defenders are quick to note that LEED is a work in progress. “We’re in our adolescent stage,” said David Gottfried, founder of the USGBC, the World Green Building Council, and WorldBuild Technologies Inc., a San Francisco consulting firm. “It’s a maturation process.”

The 501(c)(3) nonprofit’s big tent holds nearly 6,000 member organizations — a diverse and sometimes fractious array of interests working through a consensus-based decision-making process. A self-described change agent pushing a voluntary program, the USGBC has been accused of trying to placate everyone, leaving too much flexibility in the system and opening it to manipulation. “We’ve always tried to be consensus-based and open,” said Gottfried. “But, if you take that to the ultimate limit, you can get to a point where you can’t function.”

Industry players, some of them less than obviously green, lobby within the USGBC to influence the direction of LEED. They also campaign outside the organization to advance rival schemes like the NAHB’s green guidelines and the Green Globes green-building guide and self-assessment program, initially established in Canada and the U.K. Both programs are touted as cheaper and more flexible than LEED. Critics argue they don’t hold builders to high enough standards.

In August, the USGBC voted to allow industry trade associations to participate as full members, a decision that disappointed activists like Bill Walsh, national coordinator of the nonprofit Healthy Building Network, a USGBC member. He fears this could tilt the council’s agenda toward business interests. “Since every member of every trade association can also be a member of the USGBC, and often is, this gives some interests in the council two bites at every apple,” he said.

Fedrizzi argues that the USGBC should be able to withstand the extra industry presence. “People have said it will force the organization to be a lowest-common-denominator organization. [But] if a group came in and decided to strong-arm the agenda in one direction or other, I have no worries that the members would protect the organization,” he said.

Spread and Circus

Even as debate roils about LEED’s effectiveness and user-friendliness, the system is spreading rapidly. Federal departments and agencies and state and local governments are adopting LEED as a guideline or requirement for their own projects, and tax breaks and other LEED incentives are cropping up around the U.S. In many ways, LEED’s success is raising the stakes and intensifying arguments over the program’s flaws.

“We use it as a measure of our accomplishment toward our sustainability goals,” said Don Horn, director of the sustainable-design program at the General Services Agency, the federal government’s largest property owner and leasing agent. The agency pegs LEED silver as a goal for its projects, and requires certification as a minimum. “We’ve chosen to use LEED rather than coming up with our own,” he said.

Other federal agencies, more than a dozen state governments, and almost 50 municipalities cite similar “why reinvent the wheel” reasoning for their embrace of the standard. That embrace includes requiring LEED for public projects and encouraging private developers to certify their buildings.

“There are flaws. It might not apply as well to residential [projects] and location may not be emphasized enough,” said John Rahaim, planning director for Seattle, which requires LEED silver certification for new city-owned projects of more than 5,000 square feet. “But it’s largely proven.”

Seattle’s LEED experience hasn’t been an unqualified success. Two major projects, a new city hall and a court building, have undergone rough break-in periods, necessitating some costly fixes to HVAC, green-roof, sun-shading, and other systems. Some of the problems involved building features that earned LEED credits, although it’s unclear whether the problems indicate flaws in the rating system. “The issue of how we might better vet performance for the city’s buildings has cropped up,” said Rahaim. He suggests that monitoring be built into the system, to track how buildings hold up after they’re completed.

But Seattle hasn’t dropped its commitment, and in fact is now looking at adding LEED to its building code. City leaders have proposed that new privately owned buildings above a certain height or square footage be required to earn LEED certification as part of zoning rules, according to Rahaim.

Such proposals make some USGBC officials nervous. The organization gets a substantial boost from government endorsements, but it designed LEED as a voluntary program and doesn’t want to play the potentially awkward role of regulatory enforcer. “We’re not in any way promoting required acceptance of LEED,” said Fedrizzi. “If somebody said, ‘No building public or private will be built in the city unless it’s LEED rated,’ I probably would feel that that was not the right strategy. When you talk about government as an owner, they should have the ability to choose better performance. That’s a voluntary action. Applying that to private projects is a different story.”

The USGBC would rather help nudge building codes in a more sustainable direction, according to Fedrizzi. Thus, the group’s “greening the codes” initiative, an effort to infuse codes with LEED-like requirements. “The building-code system needs to be upgraded,” he said. “If it’s not formally LEED but very green, I think it’d be wonderful.”

It’s time to take LEED to the next
level.

You’ve Got to Admit It’s Getting Better

Looking to maintain its momentum despite the friction in its ranks, the USGBC is working to address member concerns and refine LEED, while broadening it to cover more types of building projects.

The council is drafting and soliciting comment on a mushrooming assortment of new LEED specifications that will expand the system into homebuilding, retail construction, and neighborhood planning, beyond its current purview of primarily commercial and institutional buildings.

It’s also collaborating with veterans of the LEED process to streamline its system for reviewing projects submitted for certification — an effort that was well under way before Schendler and Udall voiced their criticisms. Having already reduced the paperwork load with the last several LEED updates and pushed some of the red tape to the web, the organization will present more revisions at November’s Greenbuild conference in Atlanta. To expedite the certification of registered projects — currently there’s about a three-year lag — the USGBC is looking at phased reviews, a revised auditing scheme, and volume certification for builders, such as retailers, with multiple sites, Fedrizzi said.

Still, he admits, things are likely to slow down before they speed up, given the current backlog and the time required to revamp the process.

Beyond certification, the USGBC is considering ways to ensure that LEED-certified buildings perform well six months, a year, and more after they’re completed, though details like penalties for noncompliance have yet to be worked out.

The council will also be spending time over the coming months trying to resolve controversies over polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics and wood-certification systems. Some green-building advocates argue that LEED should encourage the replacement of PVC with more environmentally benign materials. The USGBC’s Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee is expected to release a final report on vinyl later this fall.

And there’s disagreement over whether LEED should give credit for the use of wood certified under the industry-backed Sustainable Forestry Initiative in addition to stocks certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which is considered to be more rigorous. In September, the USGBC hosted a “wood summit” to begin discussions on the topic.

Both issues will likely be viewed as bellwethers of the group’s approach to reconciling public health, environmental, and business interests, further revealing the hue and saturation of the USGBC’s green.

Whether the council’s efforts to adapt to the market while maintaining and even boosting standards will bring about the transformation sought by critics like Schendler and Udall remains to be seen. The concern for many longtime practitioners of green building is that the skirmishing over acronyms and checklists will distract from the larger battle to make the built environment more sustainable.

Sustainability at zoos is a tall order.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs New York City’s zoos and aquarium, is increasingly turning its attention to these and other environmental quandaries. In addition to managing what it describes as the largest urban wildlife park system in the world, the Bronx Zoo-based WCS, formerly the New York Zoological Society, is a major international conservation group with extensive research and education programs. Having recently dodged a budgetary bullet from the city government that might have put an end to the Brooklyn and Queens zoos, WCS is in the midst of revising its master plan for the first time since the 1960s, with the goal of incorporating sustainable practices throughout its facilities.

“We spend a lot of money overseas working toward wildlife conservation, and if we’re going to do that, we had better be living our mission at home,” says Sue Chin, director of planning and design for WCS.

Such eco-friendly concerns may not top the agenda at most zoos and aquariums, where attendance usually trumps sustainability in the hierarchy of goals. Still, the industry’s main trade group, the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA), is promoting ecological responsibility, and WCS and other zoo operators are putting the theory into practice.

How Do You Zoo?

Among environmentalists, zoos have always generated, at best, mixed reactions; for some, they are synonymous with cruelty and imprisonment, while others see them as progressive outposts of research and conservation. In reality, it’s tough to generalize about zoos and aquariums, since they run the gamut from unlicensed roadside menageries to professionally staffed institutions with international conservation programs and education divisions. But whatever their role in society, zoos encompass major operations with considerable resource needs and often sprawling campuses. They may or may not preach ecological awareness, but their ecological footprints are substantial.

Through its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture licenses zoos, aquariums, and other animal exhibitors — around 2,500 at present. The AZA claims to have more stringent criteria than APHIS in the areas of animal welfare, conservation, professional conduct, ethics, and education; it currently counts 212 North American institutions as members.

While the AZA members represent just a fraction of all animal operations in North America, they collectively occupy a sizeable chunk of real estate and do a high volume of business, with last year’s attendance at their facilities topping 134 million visitors. Member organizations typically sit on dozens (and sometimes hundreds or thousands) of developed acres; annual operating budgets can exceed $100 million. Although 85 percent are nonprofit, AZA institutions are big business.

Can she bear it?

The AZA may represent a step up from basic zoo licensing, but groups like the Humane Society charge that even some of the AZA’s more progressive members maintain outdated and unhealthy facilities. “There are some facilities doing some fairly innovative things, and we don’t want to discourage them,” says Richard Farinato, director of the captive wild animal protection program for the Humane Society of the United States. But at same time, he notes, there are notable lapses in animal care, including an incident earlier this year in which two endangered red pandas at Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo were accidentally poisoned with rat bait. Yet even in high-profile cases like that one, institutions can be slow to reform, according to Farinato. “They’ve done lots on paper, shuffled people around, assembled a commission from the National Academy of Sciences to examine the situation, but so far, they’ve just paid lip service to the problems,” he says.

Farinato also argues that zoos’ definition of animal welfare needs to be expanded. “To them, it means a clean cage and a good diet, but those are just the minimum responsibilities. An animal’s welfare also means its psychological well-being, choices, and the ability to express itself in a species-appropriate way,” he says. “Then you get into the question of which animals are not suited to captivity. The issue is quite large.”

And if zoos’ treatment of animals has been uneven, as a group their environmental practices have historically been even less impressive.

“You can’t overlook the impact of your institution and staff on the local environment,” says Christine Sheppard, curator of ornithology and green team leader at the Bronx Zoo. “You can’t just think about your animals, but zoos did.”

In recent years, though, there have been signs of change, from water conservation practices to renewable energy use to green building design. In a 2001 AZA member survey, about 40 percent of institutions reported composting, 40 percent said they had environmentally sensitive procurement policies, and 11 percent said they treated gray water onsite.

Environmentalism: the elephant in the living room.

Photo: Oregon Zoo.

Regional differences in environmental politics can dictate the pace of change, according to Sheppard. Some zoos — notably those in Toronto and Portland, Ore. — have “absolutely tremendous” environmental programs, she says, while others are resistant to change and worried about the bottom line: “You’re starting to see things happen within the context of local environmentalism. The more the local communities are involved in [the environmental movement], like in California and Oregon, the easier it is, versus the middle of Texas.”

But the AZA has thus far called only for voluntary sustainability efforts, so progress “all depends on the personality of the person running the institution and his or her point of view,” Farinato says. On the whole, serious environmentalism is “more an exception than the norm with zoos around the country, but the AZA tends to make it look like all zoos that are accredited are behaving like this,” he says.

Getting Down to Business

How do you go about making a zoo greener? Not all that differently than you would any other business or institution, according to Barbara Batshalom, executive director of the Green Roundtable, a sustainable-development advocacy group and Boston affiliate of the U.S. Green Building Council. The process is familiar: conserve energy, use renewable and clean power, decrease water consumption, reuse gray water, reduce and recycle solid waste, cut the use of harmful chemicals, buy sustainably produced materials and food, use mass transit, practice less destructive landscaping, and educate your employees and the general public about sustainability issues.

Go get ‘em, tiger!

Of course, some considerations are zoo-specific. “If a critter needs some sort of animal enrichment item, you can think about using objects that might otherwise get thrown out,” says Chin of WCS. Curators at the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois used recycled tires to give the floor in their swamp exhibit a springy, bog-like feel, and they use hydropower to generate the surf crashing through the zoo’s coastal ecosystem display, according to Bill Torsberg, the zoo’s resource conservation coordinator.

Zoos have “a special advantage in that they’re a campus situation. They’re controlling a lot of worlds,” Batshalom says. “In some cases their procurement standards are higher than at schools. You can use arsenic-treated wood at schools, but not at zoos.”

There’s mounting interest in holding zoos accountable for their environmental practices. In addition to her work at the Bronx zoo, Sheppard chairs the AZA’s green practices scientific advisory group, which was formed last year. The group acts as a sustainability clearinghouse and is pushing for more emphasis on environmentalism in the accreditation process. (Zoo accreditation is reviewed every five years.) Over the last several years, accreditation reviewers have begun quizzing institutions on their environmental policies and programs, Sheppard says, though ecological issues are not yet make-or-break accreditation factors.

On many fronts, WCS is setting a high bar. Last spring, the WCS-managed New York Aquarium installed a 200-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell to supply up to one-fifth of its daily electricity requirement, and, as a byproduct, heat water for some of its buildings and tanks. Even here, there is room for improvement, as the fuel cell is currently powered by natural gas. WCS is looking to add more fuel cells, and to use geothermal, wind, and solar energy where possible. The society has also committed to the expense and headache of continuing its recycling programs despite the withdrawal and phased-in return of New York City’s program, and it’s heading up efforts to restore the Bronx River watershed from Westchester County into the city.

The Bronx Zoo Lion House.

Photo: Fox & Fowle.

In addition, WCS is in the midst of some showcase green building projects. As the Bronx Zoo adapts its older buildings to current needs, it is doing so with an eye toward sustainability. For the past couple of decades, the 1903 Lion House, with a Beaux Arts exterior controlled by the city landmarks commission, sat unused; now it’s being renovated and is slated to reopen in 2006. The project architects, the appropriately named Fox & Fowle, designed the high-profile 4 Times Square Conde Nast building, among other green structures. The newly redone Lion House will qualify for the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification.

Although its plans are ambitious in scope — especially given that they’re being hatched in the midst of a recession — WCS isn’t just pouring money into expensive statements of institutional concern for the biosphere. Many of the measures have both ecological and economic paybacks and are considered worthwhile investments, according to WCS officials.

It’s All Happening at the Zoo

In addition to improving its environmental infrastructure, WCS is calling attention to the ecological impact of human activities — especially local activities. “We can convince people that they need to help us in central Africa because gorillas are at risk, because we have the gorilla standing there and looking at you. That’s kind of an easy sell,” says Chin. “But how do we have people make that connection that actions here have an impact on the environment and on the world? People think about conservation as being a thing that needs to be done in other places. How do we connect them to here?”

Going ape for sustainability.

Sheppard echoes this sentiment, saying that visitors “don’t always understand that there are a lot of problems here. We educate them about rainforests, exotic pet collecting, hunting in South America, but [habitat] fragmentation is a problem here. One of our [current] exhibits has a wooden sign that says ‘For Sale: Adirondack Lots.’”

With this sharper focus on environmentalism at home, WCS and the Bronx Zoo have, in a sense, come full circle. At the turn of the last century, the zoo was among the most progressive in the nation, boasting naturalistic enclosures, the first full-time vet and first animal hospital at a U.S. zoo, and pioneering work in captive breeding. Later, the zoo began emphasizing international conservation and raising awareness of global issues. Now, they’re stressing their place in the local ecology.

Other zoos, including those in San Francisco, Seattle, and Syracuse, incorporate environmental awareness to some degree, but usually on a project-by-project basis. By choosing a different strategy — that is, by integrating green priorities into its master plan — WCS is likely to set the standard for zoos and similar institutions across the country and around the globe. Sheppard says WCS’s public embrace of sustainability, however imperfect, can invite serious change. She likens it to the species conservation movement in the 1970s: “I was part of the generation that started looking at conservation, even though zoos hadn’t really yet. There’s been a transformation in the last 25 years. Zoos [initially] thought it was a great idea for PR [but] it attracted people like me, and we … drove the whole organization in that direction.”

Now that zoos are moving toward sustainability as well as conservation, they can help move society at large in the same direction. “Zoos are in a position to teach their visitors what they want to teach them,” says the Humane Society’s Farinato.