The Greenest Building May Actually Be a Neighborhood

Green building might be little more than a fringe hippie idea if not for certification. The medals and honors now available through rating systems have enabled a good and altruistic effort to become a highly marketable quality. LEED – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – is now the most well-known and well-used certification system, claiming nearly 9 billion square feet of space participating in its various certification programs globally. But it's not alone, and it's not necessarily the greenest of the green. The relatively new Living Building Challenge has been steadily gathering fans in the green building community for tougher-than-LEED standards such as net-zero energy and net-zero water.

"The Living Building Challenge has emerged as the high bar in sustainable design," says Walker Wells, director of the Green Urbanism program at the advocacy organization Global Green USA. He's had firsthand experience with both LEED and the Living Building Challenge and likes the fact that the Living Building Challenge requires many of the highest possible standards.