By Celeste M. Hammond and Virginia M. Harding
Since the proverbial 800-pound gorilla gets things done the way it wants them done, the presence of a gorilla may explain why the movement to green commercial real estate has developed momentum. Every day we read stories about local building owners’ green initiatives. These initiatives range from installing a green roof, putting up a wind turbine or retrofitting building systems. When a new office building project is announced, we assume that it will be green. A press release announcing plans to retrofit an existing office building to make it green is not the BIG story it once was.
This expectation shared by landlords, tenants and their respective representatives that commercial office buildings should be green is taking place at a time when there is still no commonly accepted definition of what we mean when we say that something — other than the grass — is green. Achieving a LEED certification (developed by the U. S. Green Building Council – USGBC) is one way to label a building as green and it is a recognizable certification. But the sustainability or greenness of a building can be measured by other rating systems such as Green Globes (created by the Canadian Standards Association) and Energy Star (established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy).