Since its launch in 1993 by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program has become the standard measure of sustainability for buildings worldwide. Successfully reaching one of four LEED certification levels—Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum—requires specific point totals, which differ among building types. Getting certified, in addition to altruistic benefits, allows building owners to take advantage of a growing number of state and local government incentives. The menu of potential points available for various practices ranges from installing bike racks on-site to documenting the source of the iron ore used in anyconstruction steel. As any architect or developer can attest, navigating this complex system of required prerequisites and credits can be maddening. It may be good to be green, but it's still far from easy.
An architect's knowledge of materials can make or break a building's rating. Though LEED's performance-based criteriaexclude individual materials and products from earning points toward certification, their specific use can. Apply a material in the wrong situation and you may not get credit for it. Fortunately, with a little insider knowledge, you can also use one material to get credit in two, three, or even more areas. LEED Materials is packed with critical information on nearly two hundred materials, products, and services. Organized in the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) MasterFormat—industry standard in building contracts—this highly visual guide makes sure your material choices and uses will maximize your LEED credits. LEED Materials includes a foreword by Steven Winter, former chairman of the U.S. Green Building Council.
Ari Meisel is a self described, “Overwhelmologist” who helps entrepreneurs who have opportunity in excess of what their infrastructure can handle, to optimize, automate, and outsource everything in their business, so they can make themselves replaceable and scale their business.
Ari is the Founder of Less Doing, author of the best-selling book, “The Art of Less Doing”, and its sequel, the forthcoming “The Replaceable Founder”, coming this September.
He is a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, an Ironman, and a devoted husband to Anna and father to four children, Ben, 6, Sebastien and Lucas, 4 and Chloe, 2.
When Ari Meisel was diagnosed with a severe case of the incurable digestive ailment known as Crohn’s disease, he quickly found himself in the hospital and soon thereafter on a host of medications. After hitting a truly low point, he decided it was time to take matters into his own hands. Putting himself on a strict regiment of yoga, healthy eating, nutritional supplements and intense exercise, Meisel not only beat back the symptoms, he was in fact eventually declared cured of his "incurable" disease.
One of the outcomes of this log and difficult journey was the deep realization that he wanted to live his precious gift of healthy life much more fully. He quickly saw how much of his time was wasted by tasks that could just as easily be done by others. Thus was born his blog, the art of Less Doing, so that we all might have more living.