ATLANTA — In response to recently proposed changes to the
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, the
GREENGUARD Environmental Institute has launched a public campaign urging the
U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to strengthen its credit requirements for low-emitting interiors,
according to a press release.
Despite the widely-publicized findings of the April 2010 report by
Environment and Human Health Inc. —which criticized the LEED rating system for ignoring the health impacts of product emissions — the proposed changes to IEQ Credit 4 (known as "EQ Credit: Low-Emitting Interiors") fail to make product emissions requirements more stringent, the release stated.
"One of the biggest problems with the proposed credit is that it calls for limits on only a fraction of all potentially hazardous compounds — those identified by California as having ''Chronic Reference Exposure Levels,'' or CRELs," says Mark Rossolo, director of public affairs at the GREENGUARD Environmental Institute.
