Number of LEED commercial building projects surpasses 100,000

LEED reached another milestone recently when the certification program surpassed 100,000 commercial projects.

“In 1998, we created LEED to measure and define what green building meant, and to provide a roadmap for developing sustainable buildings,” said Mahesh Ramanujam, president and CEO, USGBC. “This latest milestone demonstrates how the global green building community is delivering on the vision we set forth more than 20 years ago with better buildings and spaces that equal better lives.”

LEED is the most widely used green building rating system in the world. With more than 2.6 million sf of space being certified each day, millions of people around the world have access to LEED spaces.

Currently, buildings account for almost 40% of global energy-related carbon. The continued adoption of LEED and certification is imperative to decarbonize buildings, communities, and cities, according to a news release from the U.S. Green Building Council.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.