City Green Building -- Resources: Design Tools & Strategies

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Design Tools and Strategies

While contractors in Seattle already build to some of the toughest energy, air quality, stormwater management, and water efficiency standards in the nation, we're working to make our standards even better by encouraging participation in a variety of green building programs.

The following programs serve as useful benchmarking tools and performance standards, help set design and construction goals, and provide a snapshot of green building market activity:

Recognized Green Building Programs

LEED™ - a voluntary, national green building standard and certification system
Built Green™ - a non-profit, local residential green building program
SeaGreen - tailored to non-profit developers of affordable housing
Evergreen Sustainable Development Standard - developed to set a minimum level of sustainable performance for projects that will apply to the Housing Trust Fund (HTF) after July 1, 2008.
Green Guide for Health Care (GGHC) - a new high-performance and healthy-building initiative developed specifically for health care institutions and facilities
Labs21 - a voluntary partnership program dedicated to improving the environmental performance of U.S. laboratories.
Living Building Challenge - is a cohesive standard – pulling together the most progressive thinking from the worlds of architecture, engineering, planning, landscape design and policy.
The 2030 Challenge - fossil fuel reduction for all new buildings and major renovations, the challenge is asking the global architecture and building community to adopt targets toward carbon neutrality by 2030.
Energy Star - the national energy performance rating is a type of external benchmark that helps energy managers assess how efficiently their buildings use energy, relative to silimar buildings nationwide.
Sustainable Sites Initiative - an interdisciplinary effort by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden to create voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices.
Capital GREEN - was developed by the Seattle Capital Programs Division of the Department of Facilities and Administrative Services for internal use. The sustainable master plan outlines environmentally responsible strategies that apply toward small new construction and remodeling projects, such as expansions and renovation projects, as well as tenant improvement projects and infrastructure replacement projects.