Dive Brief:

• The latest version of LEED, Version 4 approved by members this year, expands the ways that the materials used in projects can help up the building's score.
• The result is likely to be materials suppliers altering their product lines so that they can sell into the green-building market with a competitive match.
• LEED v4 will let project proponents gain credits when the materials used have transparency about their impacts, even if they're disclosing unhelpful information, when the products can do well in a a calculation of their environmental attributes over their life cycles, when sourcing of components shows sustainability and when materials report their chemical constituents and possibly show they have avoided more harmful alternatives.

Dive Insight:

By taking a lot more about construction materials into consideration in LEED scoring, the U.DS. Green Building Council stands a good chance of influencing how construction materials are sourced and manufactured simply by creating a path of least resistance for suppliers. The situation is akin to the effect that large states such as California and Texas have had on textbooks for U.S. schools. Publishers want to have entree to the largest markets, and content targeted to them becomes the default for everyone else because publishers do not want the expense of producing a range of versions of the same book.