Dive Brief:

• The Defense Department has issued a directive that military facilities can use either Green Globes or LEED as a measuring tool in doing green construction.
• The department had been a LEED-only agency, but a Pentagon spokesman says that "no particular system is favored over another" in the new policy, which applies to new construction or renovation in the agency's roughly 300,000 buildings worldwide.
• The government's landlord for civilian buildings, the General Services Administration, recommended in October that the government switch to allowing LEED or Green Globes.

Dive Insight:

Green Globes is the rating system created by the Green Building Initiative. It is a challenge to the supremacy of the LEED system run by the U.S. Green Building Council. For years, LEED was the only game in any town for setting environmental benchmarks and having a standard by which buildings and environmental techniques could be compared. USGBC released the fourth version of LEED this year after approval by the council's members.