by Caroline Gabsewics

Staff Writer

Over the past few years more and more buildings have become LEED Certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.

First, it was new commercial buildings and later older buildings were becoming LEED certified by passing the LEED rating system. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

In February, the U.S. Green Building Council launched LEED for Homes.

Locally, the U.S. Green Building Council’s North Florida Chapter has established a Residential Green Building Committee.

The newly formed committee will be training, educating and simply speaking with both homeowners and residential builders about becoming LEED certified.

“The residential arena is very different from the commercial side,” said Paki Taylor, president of the North Florida Chapter.

At the chapter’s latest meeting last month at the River City Brewing Company in downtown Jacksonville, Paul Witt, president of RP Witt Construction, and Tom Scangarello of Operation New Hope spoke about residential green building.

“When I first started researching what it mean to be ‘green,’ I found that there were many programs out there that didn’t encompass everything that LEED does,” said Witt.

Currently, the LEED Point System includes:

• innovation and design

• location and linkages

• sustainable site

• water efficiency

• energy and atmosphere

• materials and resources

• indoor environmental quality

• awareness education

The point system is used to determine the building’s or home’s level of certification:

• Certified: 26-32 points

• Silver: 33-38 points

• Gold: 39-51 points

• Platinum: 52-69 points

Scangarello spoke about the benefits homeowners will have when building a green home.

They include:

• Economic

• Environmental

• Health

• Water conservation

“Green built homes use 30 to 50 percent less energy to heat or cool the home,” he said. “They also use 10 to 20 percent less water.

“It comes out to hundreds of dollars of savings each year.”

The hardest and one of the most important parts about building green homes is keeping the product affordable.

“The best thing we can do is get the word out to builders and homeowners that this is available to them,” said Scangarello. “Some of the easiest ways to do that is to host open houses and have signage on the job site.”

For more information about LEED for homes, visit www.usgbc.org.