LEED

Lexfloor offers a complete line of ‘green’ and LEED-compliant wood flooring products, as well as eco-friendly companion products such underlayments.

For more than a decade, the green building movement has been a major force in California and across the rest of the country and much of the world. At the center of this movement are green building rating systems that organize and codify green design and construction practices by creating one or more rating systems, and by far and away the best know and most widely used is LEED.

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and is a family of green building rating systems that cover a variety of types of commercial and residential construction. LEED is currently the most popular green building program in the world. It was created and is administered by U.S. Green Building Council.

LEED certifies buildings, not products or manufacturers. LEED is organized into a number of broad categories (e.g. Sustainable Sites, Energy & Atmosphere, Materials & Resources, Indoor Environmental Quality). Each category contains numerous credits that relate to a specific approach, technology, or product that falls logically under that broad heading. And each credit contains one or more points that can be earned by meeting the credit requirements.

A building can get LEED certified if it earns a certain number of LEED points.

There are different levels of LEED certification depending on how many points the project earns (LEED Certified, Silver, Gold, Platinum), and there are many points that the project team can choose from as they design the building and plan which level of certification they want to attain.

A flooring product might help a building qualify for one or more LEED points, but a single product doesn’t guarantee that the building gets the point because the point is awarded based on how products from that category of materials were used throughout the entire building.

Also, a project team may decide not to pursue the credit that is relevant to the category of materials in question, in which case the product selections in that category may not matter, even though the building is still going for LEED certification.

Being aware of LEED and how it works can help give you credibility with your customers and gain access to a rapidly growing sector of the market.