How Many Versions of LEED? C&D Interpreted

This Latest News post comes to you from the “Turn Back Time” department.

The Recycling Certification Institute (RCI) remains engaged on numerous issues directly and indirectly related to third-party certification.  One of the key issues for 2019 has been the United States Green Building Council’s (USGBC) updates to LEED.  A prior version of LEED (v4) required separation of C&D material streams for credit in the Materials and Resources section.  USGBC updated v4 with a new release in January 2019 in the form of v4.1 beta.  While still requiring separation of C&D materials, v4.1 beta sought to make it easier for builders who took their mixed C&D materials to facilities Certified by RCI.  Unfortunately, the initial version of v4.1 beta added confusion and did not meaningfully address the issues associated with onsite separation of material streams.

RCI continued its communication with USGBC regarding our concerns and last summer the USGBC released an updated version of LEED v4.1 beta.  This latest release is the closest we’ve seen to our original recommendations to USGBC.  While it provides incentive for builders to take mixed C&D loads to RCI-Certified facilities and addresses some of the issues with onsite material separation, it still does not go quite far enough.  We will continue our work with USGBC to bring benefits to projects taking C&D materials to RCI-Certified facilities, which in turn benefits those facilities that are or become RCI-Certified.

We recognize there is still confusion in the “C&D-sphere” with multiple versions of LEED still in play (v2009, v4, and v4.1 beta, for example).  To assist C&D facilities, builders, contractors, project managers/consultants, haulers, local government, etc., we have created a sheet that simplifies the various versions of LEED and provides some basic Q&A as examples.  You may download the sheet at our resources page www.recyclingcertification.org/resources/ .