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A Zero Waste Update to LEED
By: Paul Palmer - Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Source: The Zero Waste Institute
Buildings are said to use one-third of all the electricity created. They also gobble up hard materials by the millions of tons and control our living and working environment.
They are so important that many organizations have devoted much thought to their design. There are green building design organizations by the score. Search for them on the web. But the foremost organization is called the United States Green Building Council which publishes the LEED standards. Here is how Architectural Week describes them: LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. They are a set of routes to a way to make housing more efficient for producer and end user and in maintenance over the life of the building. The target is not wasting, and using what sun and water you get naturally, instead of shunting them away. Ideally, a structure adds more oxygen than the C02 it produces, even in the use of equipment and materials. The emphasis is on limiting impact on resources and maximizing beautiful design for a space that is more ergonomic to live and work in.
LEED is measured by these criteria:
- Sustainable Site
- Water Efficiency
- Energy and Atmosphere
- Indoor Environmental Quality
- Materials and Resources
The top score for a building is 69. The score determines the ranking of Certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum.
The LEED rules are innovative, far reaching and effective. They are referenced in green designs over and over. They cover many principles that do not flow overtly from a Zero Waste strategy (even though the avoidance of waste is a pervasive subtext). Yet they are not based on Zero Waste principles but on recycling principles. Therefore they fail some important Zero Waste tests, because they rely on wasteful recycling methods.
At the time they were developed, the creators had only the recycling perspective to make use of but now there is a need for a more advanced view. When green building depends on the recycling of materials it accepts a low level reuse strategy. The concrete, plaster and other heavy materials are not conserved as completed forms but are viewed as basic materials to be broken, smashed up and if possible, reused for minor and wasteful applications, such as broken aggregate for roads. Their high functions (as fully formed building components) are ignored. The recycling designation of C & D (Construction and Demolition) debris is adopted. Anytime that C & D is invoked, you know that you are dealing with a low level of reuse. This is garbage dump diversion notation and has been widely adopted by the garbage industry as well as the recycling industry.
What is needed in building is to develop modular assembly of concrete and plaster parts which can be disassembled after the building is no longer useful, taken away and used for a new building. There are many ways in which this can be done and the thinking can be extended to roofs and floors and many other parts. The federal EPA, never known for its progressive views, has already urged sidewalks to be built out of concrete squares that are joined together by fasteners and can be disassembled and reused. This is a design with obvious applications to monolithic floors, or pads.
At present, LEED emphasizes the use of recycled materials in creating the building. What it needs to do instead is set up cycles of functional reuse which will result in the availability of whole components that can be reused, rather than mere materials. Of course, for as long as the recycling paradigm rules, it is better to reuse those materials than to make no attempt at all at recycling.
There are also built-in features that need to be reused whole. Kitchen cabinets are typically built in in ways that necessitate their destruction at the end of the building's life, or even during a remodel. Instead they need to be made as modular components that can easily be removed while preserving their function as cabinets.
Distributed utilities (wires, plumbing) are another such feature. Tile work and closets could also use a Zero Waste analysis. Windows and doors need to be designed not to simply go to a reuse yard but to be supremely reusable when they are removed. This may require standard (and reversible) fastening methods for holding them in place and standard sizes and hardware. RFID's should label each one so that they can be scanned for inventory in their next applications (these would be useful in replacing or remodeling as well since they can be scanned for a model, size, design etc.).
Reusable Buildings
There is one important case where the reuse in question is ultimately the entire building. Can you think of a large building that already has the practical ability to be easily dismantled and reassembled? I am referring to steel buildings, such as commercial warehouses. It is entirely possible to assemble these out of standard frames, steel panel skins and bolts or screws. However, most of these are put together with no thought at all as to how they will be reused after a first life. Welding and non-standard parts are the rule.
Furthermore, we are mostly burdened by a backward, politically primitive permitting system which dictates the primacy of a demolition industry. This industry, like the garbage industry that underlies it, should one day be but a mere memory, when all construction is done by zero waste standards and is made for reuse. For now, even if a steel building is perfectly dismantlable and reusable, that won't happen. Political considerations will force a permit to be given to a demolition contractor who is therefore certified to charge a large amount of money for his work. Every contractor will tell you that he cannot afford to dismantle anything but must crush and destroy everything. They will all proudly report though, that they salvage 5 percent of the value by taking the steel in for recycling and concrete for crushing. The remaining 95 percent of the value never enters their minds.
After they get their permit, and their huge fees, they may graciously allow some more ecologically minded reuse group to dismantle the building. This group will receive no fee, will be notified at the last minute, will be given a punishing schedule that may be impossible to meet, will have to deal with a design that was not made for dismantling and, worst of all in the grand scheme of things, will get no official recognition and will be barred from becoming the preferred contractor for such projects, for a variety of biases having to do with the subsidies given to dumps that destructive demolition can well take advantage of but reusers can't.
There is a crying need to reform the building permit process so that destructive demolition is barred from touching any building until a Zero Waste group or company has had adequate time and opportunity to design a plan for as close to total reuse of the building as possible or has certified that certain parts cannot presently be reused. Of course this would accompany the need to change the building permit process so that one-way-trip buildings could not be built at all except under the strenuous objections of any concerned party. A non-reusable building could well come under the Environmental Quality Act and require an environmental impact review (EIR). This will give just a hint of how Zero Waste analysis can reduce the wastefulness inherent in even good green building today.
For more information, visit the Zero Waste Institute website.
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