Evolving Tools

摘要

Editor's Note: Following the interview with Doug Gatlin, we spoke With Brendan Owens, the U.S. Green Building Council's vice president for LEED technical development. Following are highlights of that conversation. The buildings industry, over the last 8 years (since LEED has been in the market), has changed ... faster than we ever could have expected it to. There's an opportunity to rethink the way we built the LEED rating system. If you look at the way LEED-NC was built in 2000, the credits and the Materials & Resources [MR] section represent proxies for life-cycle-assessment-based thinking: recycled content, local regional materials, or bio-based materials. Those are single-attribute life-cycle-assessment analysis tools. In a lot of ways, the education the market has received as a result of the discussion of those issues enables us to have a broader discussion about integrating and looking at those things holistically. We're moving from single-attribute screening to multi-attribute screening. When you make that leap, you're talking about true life-cycle assessment.