The LEED Certification method

The LEED certification was developed and introduced in the USA in 1999 by the USA Green Building Council, the organization which unites the representatives of the construction and research sectors and of the North American government entities, with the aim of supplying all the building sectors with a useful tool for certifying building sustainability.

The certification evaluates and authenticates the environmental, social and economic sustainability, through a flexible system which specifies differentiated formulation for the different types of buildings, while maintaining a coherent basic set-up:  LEED New Construction (NC), Existing Buildings (EB), Commercial Interiors (CI), Core & Shell (CS), Homes, Neighborhood Development. In particular, LEED-NC concerns the construction of new buildings and the relevant restructuring of existing structures.

THE LEED SANTA MARGHERITA PROTOCOL

During recent years, the LEED certification has appeared on the international panorama, reaping success as a construction sustainability certification system. The ever growing number of members of the US Green Building Council, which reaches 15,700 units, underscores the great awareness of the sector’s operators as concerns the subject of eco-sustainability. According to official data issued by UGSBC, there are more than 1,500 LEED certified projects and almost 12,000 projects for which the certification procedure has already been started.

Following the widespread nature of this rating system, it has become key for designers and architects to have information on “LEED compliant products”, i.e. products with particular eco-sustainable characteristics available on the international market.

In the light of the above, the “Protocol LEED Santa Margherita” provides interested professionals a selection of the parameters for which agglomerate material can perform well. The purpose of this manual is to provide a LEED system guideline, enabling designers or our company’s direct customers to find a clear and immediate  answer to the technical requests increasingly emerging at the project stage.

LEED and Santamargherita

As we already said, the LEED certification is the certification of a building and not of a product. Therefore, LEED criteria always refer to the building system and not to the single materials used in the project. In his case, the Santamargherita engineered stone cannot on its own guarantee reaching a score, but it can contribute to conforming to the LEED requirements. The threshold  indicated in the credits therefore refers to the parameter to which the building must conform to assign the relevant score.