US Green Guys

Becoming a LEED AP has been all the rage these past few years, and everywhere you look, you now see those string of letters on EVERYONE's email signatures. The US may not be number one when it comes to worldwide rankings of greenness, but with all the hype out there in our homeland, you'd think that everyone and their mom's a LEED AP by now. This really got me wondering exactly how many people really do get to tack on a million more letters of prestige after their signatures.

According to GBCI's tally on LEED professionals, the US boasts a whopping 82,019 people with 24,951 being architects (it was not specified if these were licensed individuals or not, but for now, let's just assume so). Wow, that's a lot of architects, right? Or is it? NCARB's list from 2011 counted a total of 104,301 individually registered architects in the country (not counting reciprocities) which makes only 24% of us 'marketably' green. Not to say that those other 76% don't practice responsible design, but should we be pushing this type of standardized education harder since it IS our products that guzzle up a huge chunck of today's energy consumption? Or is there some other way besides passing the LEED exam to show that we actually do know our stuff without having to pay $100s of dollars to another organization? I don't know if there's any clear answer on this one, but the numbers do at least show that LEED is nowhere near slowing down. For the amount of gripes about the system, at least it's moving us in a more positive direction.

Below you will see a diagram showing the total number of architects in the States, one leaf for every 1000 individuals with only about a quarter being a LEED professional of some sort. What do you think? Do more of us architects need to be 'green leaves'? (and no, I'm not alluding that all non-LEED people are 'dead' leaves....it's just a fun tribute to fall, ha). Or does it really make a different in our industry?

And so you might ask, ok, so what about all those other leaves underneath the pile that we can't see.....well it's obvious, right? there are no other leaves, just a guy and his dogs hanging out in the shadows. Random, of course. This whole blog isn't going to be completely serious number crunching material at every post : )

How Green are We?

Welcome one and all to the kick-off of Green Limn where I investigate a variety of topics to try and understand what it means to be green, how to be green, and what notions out there are just a bunch of 'wash. Unfortunately, with the overuse of the term 'sustainability' one often is forced to oversimplify or simply under-digest the real meanings or solutions as to how to make the man-made environment function in a more cohesive manner. No promises here, but hopefully by illustrating some basic to complex concepts we can all at least feel a bit more informed if not wired to question the validity of something being sustainable or not. 

Let's start big. How about the US. Are we a green country? And if so, what does that really mean? Living in Europe, it's already easy to see that the US is far behind, but why is that? Well, simply scratching the surface it's easy to see that space is precious, energy is expensive, gas is not cheap, and recycling is a huge part of life. Right there, by cutting back on one's energy consumption, using public transit ( a car in Paris, are you nuts?), and making conscious decisions about what one throws away, you already have someone who appears 'green' to most. Some 'break-through' advances for some people, such as putting a recycling bin in their home/office is honestly second nature in other parts of the world. There really is no space to continue filling landfills, therefore, something else must be done. It really is hard to grasp comparisons between different nations and their ideas of green since each place has it's own circumstances and stories, but no one ever said it was a bad thing looking to your neighbor for successful tactics to hopefully implement on your own home turf. That is, as long as it's appropriate for your situation. Don't be that guy who simply puts solar panels on his roof that barely gets any sun just to feel better about himself. That's not green. That's just ignorant.

This thought of comparison was still intriguing, so sifting around a bit, I found a few sites ranking countries throughout the world for their greenness. According to Yale's Environmental Performance Index, the US ranked 49th out of 123 countries for 2012. Yikes.

You can find another fun ranking system at Greendex where you can calculate how 'green' your lifestyle is and compare this to countries around the world (it really is an apples to oranges kind of comparison, but hey, it may be something fun to chat about around the water cooler...do offices even have those anymore?....) Ironically, my score came up the same as France. Coincidence?

It's hard to really compare such huge entities to each other so let's zoom in a bit. I was curious to then see how our not-so-great world-wide-ranking US does amongst itself. According to the Green Town's Guide you can see the ratings given to each state and in what area they shine (or don't shine at all). Below gives the criteria used to rate each state, and by the looks of this list, this seems like a fair enough assessment with about 2/5 of our nation at the head of the game (ranking of 3-4). Not bad, but could be much much better. Take it for what you will, because like country to country, each state has it's own circumstances compared to it's neighbor. But hey, at least this sight sheds some light onto what each state is doing individually, and if anything, the info makes a fun graphic. Who knows, if not for the education factor, this could at least  be the next flooring pattern for some carpet rep to come brag about ..... "and we call this sample, 'Waves of Grain, to make a perfect compliment to our Summer Harvest Collection..." for any of you designers out there who've attended these kinds of lunch-and-learns, you know exactly what I'm talking about. We all get it, carpet is only so exciting, but enough with the wacked-out names (and for all you carpet reps out there, I do mean this all in jest. Some of those wacky names really make my day. )

Ratings based on the following criteria:

Air Quality
Water Quality
Recycling Rate
Green Businesses
Renewable Energy Usage
LEED Buildings
Emissions Rate Per Capita
Energy and Water Consumption Per Capita
Waste Generation Per Capita

The 50 States rated on their greenness
( Low = 0 to High = 4)