LEED Grows With Retail, Volume Programs

November 26th, 2010 - LEED is getting bigger — and, it hopes, more efficient. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), after testing the concept in a three-year pilot program, is officially launching LEED for Retail, which it says will enable “forward-thinking retailers to integrate green building design, construction and operation into ground-up construction, retail interior and build-out projects.”

At the same time, the USGBC said it would also institute the LEED Volume Program, intended to make it less cumbersome and less expensive for large-scale property developers to earn LEED certification. This is another program the USGBC has been testing and Starwood Hotels and Resorts said in a USGBC press release that it used LEED Volume to “streamline the LEED certification process and, by extension, even our own internal design and construction processes.” {read rest}