Green Issues: Page 12

LEED v4: Going Certified & Transparent

We’re looking at the types of changes in the new LEED v4 and I think this is probably the feature that will hit the bottom line for most of the flooring industry: a significant increase in the need for Transparency/Third Party Certification (TPC) for products to be considered compliant. We may not have to change our production, but we’re going to have to pay a lot more to prove our innocence.LEED v4 is now focused on having as many compliance statements as possible being third-party certified.

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LEED V4: The Radical Restructuring

Last week I suggested that one way to look at the new LEED v4 was to consider three types of changes. The first and most significant to LEED builders is the radical restructuring of the category system.LEED v4 has eliminated the single feature categories and introduced an aggregate value concept. The idea behind this is that you don’t want a product that is great in one area but not great in another—products should be good in all areas, and the sum impact of all products should be greater than the individual parts. In older LEED versions there were clear and specific sections where you could quickly plug in a product. The easiest example for wood is regarding FSC-certified material, our old credit MR7. It was a section unto itself: Aa product could be FSC and contribute based exclusively on that characteristic. It was also easy to understand “will X contribute or not?” Now FSC is just one option out of many that could be selected to “tip the scales” within one of the material resource credit categories. And because requirements are now more “holistic” in nature, if you have an FSC floor that does not also meet the air-quality requirements, it is not likely to be of interest to the architect. In the past, FSC could stand alone as a desired characteristic, but now if the product doesn’t meet other considerations, the FSC certification alone is not sufficient to cause someone to choose it. For the flooring industry, we normally looked at two mega categories: material resources and indoor environmental air quality. Both have changed in LEED v4.For material resources, product characteristics that previously had independent categories such as FSC, recycled content, and rapidly renewable, have been kept, but have been merged into a single concept: “MR Credit 3: Building Product Disclosure and Optimization – Sourcing of Raw Materials.” In this credit you have to look at all materials used in the building and reach a certain threshold of qualifiers, which I won’t go into detail on here. But the results that will be of particular interest to flooring folks is that bamboo is no longer going to be a meaningful credit option, and the demand for FSC is likely to be somewhat reduced.In LEED v4, all of 4.1, 4.2, 4.5 (sealers, paints and finished products) have been merged into a single “low emitting materials” category where everything used in the entire project has to meet a specified total threshold. The old 4.4 (NAUF) is gone completely. And all products must be third-party certified for their emissions and content claims. For flooring products, 100 percent of all flooring used must meet “General Emissions Evaluation,” which is essentially certification to CA 01350 (VOC Green, FloorScore and GreenGuard Gold certified products.) Note that this includes prefinished SOLID flooring as well as engineered.For “wet goods,” which are site-applied coatings, adhesives, sealers, etc., they have dual requirement to meet BOTH a third-party-certified VOC content condition and a VOC emissions limit. And for underlays, there are also new requirements to meet additional emission standards.The bottom line is that an FSC floor that is not CA 01350 certified is unlikely to be of interest to a LEED project. And you can expect to see your adhesive and site finish guys jump through a lot of hoops to document their chemical contents and emissions. The radical restructuring of LEED is going to deemphasize the single characteristic and force us to look at the total package more aggressively then before.

LEED v4 Reference Guide for Building Design and Construction

Learning LEED (the v4 Edition)

At the right is a guide to LEED 2009—it’s bigger than most phone books. And it reads a little bit like the tax code (although frankly not as bad as some certification systems—I think FSC guidelines are probably an even more challenging slog.) Now mate this phone book with a college level calculus textbook, and you start getting closer to LEED v4.

Guide to LEED 2009

Zeroing in on Language, Part 3: Compliant vs. Certified

Ok, here’s the last post on language for a bit. Let’s consider the difference between “compliant” and “certified.”There is no such thing as a LEED-certified product.Customers should not ask for CARB certifications for floors—for the most part, they don’t exist.

Zeroing in on Language, Part 2: Valuing E0

You see E0 on a lot of labels, don’t you? It’s also in a lot of marketing material. And I think it has zero meaning for our industry. For the majority of the industry, when you see an “E,” you think Europe. And you should. In most every case, a company talking about the “E” standard is implying a European standard of evaluating formaldehyde emissions. But the EU doesn’t have an E0 level. E1 is the lowest that is formally defined in common usage. I have tried to trace the history of E0. I found an actual formal and real E0 out there, but it isn’t for what you think. From the best I can find out from my own experience, a lot of online research and chatting with a lot of testing companies and certifying bodies, “E0” is almost always a created term used by any number of groups as a marketing tool. 1. E0 being used to relate a Japanese rating to a European one.In the old days we really had the European standards as the world standards. Then the Japanese went formaldehyde-fearful and started pushing their “F” standard. Their required F**** (F Four Star) rating was lower than E1. So some manufacturers who met the F**** level called their product E0. Then of course CARB came along and set the new standard that most of us follow. Here’s a quick generalized comparison (and it’s generalized because the details of testing differs between all three):I found companies advertising a “Super E0."

Chart comparing formaldehyde floor emissions ratings

Zeroing in on Language, Part 1: ‘Zero Content’

You will often see advertising promising “Zero VOC content” and “E0 formaldehyde” or similar language. That “zero” looks pretty good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately it’s not really accurate. I’m going to try to break it down, but this gets tricky since a lot of these statements could be technically accurate but completely meaningless …There’s nothing in this world that is actually VOC-free.

Goodbye to NAUF?

As noted a few weeks ago, NAUF is No Added Urea Formaldehyde. And no, the industry is not stopping production of NAUF flooring, there’s still plenty out there, but its specified demand may well be reduced over the next year or so. And frankly, I think it’s a good thing.As a manufacturer/distributor, I loved the old EQ4.4, where composite wood products produced as NAUF could contribute.

Green Blog Formaldehyde

Comparing Green Programs

Last week I talked about Testing Specifications vs. Brands, and before that I talked about how I thought it shouldn’t always be necessary to get third party certification of a green attribute. As I was doing some research for those various posts, I stumbled across two useful articles on understanding green logos that I thought I should share. You will find them here and here. (That first link appears to have turned into “available for registered users only since I found it, but I’ll leave it here since you may well be a subscriber or it may convert back!)I’m often frustrated by the need to prove my innocence through third-party certification.

Testing Specifications vs. Brands: Learn about Thirteen Fifty

There is a public specification developed by the State of California to quantify emissions of VOCs that is officially and currently known under the long title of: "California Specification 01350 (Standard Method v1.1, effective January 1, 2012)." It is often just referred to as “Section 01350” in writing or "Thirteen-Fifty" when spoken. (There are a few other short forms that refer to different revisions of the protocol—to the best of my knowledge, 2012's version is the latest—but if it changes again, it still should be recognized as "Section 01350.")Section 01350 looks for a specified performance from finished products that are “job-ready,” like engineered flooring or office furniture. The CARB (and soon EPA) regulations are performance-based standards covering emissions from certain unfinished composite wood products—most of which are destined for further processing downstream. The specification is very detailed. It outlines the testing methodology: how and when to collect samples, how to package and then prepare them, how to test them, what to look for in the test results, and what levels of emissions are acceptable. It was originally used mostly by the vinyl and carpet industries, rather than for wood. It is an “expensive” test because it requires a long time in the test chamber, multiple readings over several days and it covers a huge range of chemical emissions (very few of which anyone would ever expect to find in wood). However due to some aggressive marketing and because there wasn’t a specific alternative created for the wood industry, it has become the green building default for establishing "green" air quality emissions from any flooring surface. Section 01350 is used as the underlying testing specifications for programs created by a number of private certification/testing companies. So while Section 01350 may be the test protocol followed, most will only really recognize the brand names of the programs using the specification. Probably the best known at this time is "FloorScore," a brand name owned by Resilient Floor Covering Institute (RFCI) and managed by SCS. It was used originally only by the resilient flooring industry but has now spread to being applied to other materials—including not only wood flooring products, but also even non-flooring items.The bottom line is that this is THE most current definition we have for “green” in the world of air quality.

Threatened, But Not By Us ...

Last week I walked the Hill with colleagues from the flooring, lumber, panel, and other wood industries for the Hardwood Federation Fly-In. We had several items on the agenda, but the key one was the situation with the Northern long eared bat (NLEB).So, logging is not just doing no harm; it can even be helpful. The bat IS threatened. It just isn’t threatened by us, the wood industry.

Range Of Northern Long Eared Bat

Hardwood Federation Fly-In 2014

I am in Washington again for the annual Federation Fly-In. We’ve had a great turnout, and beyond hoping to do some good for the industry and get educated on the issues, it’s great to just catch up with people. Here are some of my colleagues at the Fly-In: NWFA Chairman Jeff Fairbanks, NWFA CEO Michael Martin and NWFA board member Brenda Cashion of Pinnacle Interior Elements.

Eab Jeff Fairbanks Michael Martin Brenda Cashion

Alphabet Soup Series, Part 15 of Many: ISO

The ISO is the International Organization for Standardization, and, as the name implies, the group develops and publishes International Standards.

Page 12 of 33

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