Washington, D.C.—(May 24, 2016)—Today, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) announced a new LEED pilot credit—Building Material Human Hazard & Exposure Assessment, which encourages project teams and manufacturers to assess human health related exposure scenarios for products during their installation and use phases.
“LEED v4, the latest version of the LEED green building system, has begun a shift in how we think about health and building materials,” said Scot Horst, chief product officer, USGBC. “We have a focus on transparency and optimization so specifiers can know what they are using and can reward innovation. But understanding how a material impacts human health requires a full understanding of hazard and exposure. The new pilot credit is a first step toward evaluating exposure by encouraging product inventories in order to prioritize decision making.”
The pilot credit seeks to reward manufacturers who perform hazard and exposure assessments that can serve as a basis for developing products designed to minimize human health impacts during installation and use of the products. These assessments can, in turn, be an important consideration for alternative assessment of building materials. By requiring exposure to be considered during product development, this pilot begins to make linkages between the product’s ingredient inventory and hazard assessment required by the existing Materials Ingredients credit and performance testing required by LEED’s Low Emitting Materials credits. Read More at USGBC >
