Deck Design – Green Building with Ipe Decking – Part 1

Deck Design of the Week Green Building in Michigan Today’s Deck Design of the week is a two-parter. We’re going to look at the before and after phases of building a green home that has some wonderful sustainable and eco-friendly features. The mind behind this home’s beauty is Danny Forster, host of Extreme Engineering and …

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LEED Requirements & Ipe Wood

There are many different LEED requirements that builders and architects can take advantage of. One particular credit is the MRc7 credit.

If a green building project uses a certain percentage of FSC wood, they can qualify for this LEED credit. If you want to qualify for this LEED credit, your project must have installed at least 50% of FSC wood. An exemplary performance Innovation in Design credit can be attained if you use 95% FSC certified wood.

There are many different kinds of FSC wood available including:

  • FSC Ipe
  • FSC Cumaru
  • FSC Tigerwood
  • FSC Garapa

The great thing about building green and LEED construction projects is that they are extremely creative. The green building revolution is certainly pushing the envelope when it comes to how hardwoods like ipe wood can be utilized. One such example that I recently found was the recently opened Eco Park in the Discovery Green Conservancy project in Houston, Texas. 60% of the wood used throughout the whole park used ipe hardwood. Using ipe hardwood helped the Discovery Green park project earn a Gold level LEED certification.

The designers and planners of Discovery Green chose ipe for the following reasons:

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LEED Certification – The Basics of This Green Building Initiative

The LEED Certification (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) was established by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to provide the construction and building industries with a verifiable system to define exactly what a green building is. Using a point system, an eco-friendly building can achieve LEED certification.

The more points a green building accumulates, the more prestigious the LEED Certification. If you think all it takes to get LEED Certified is screwing in a couple of compact fluorescent light bulbs, think again.  The USGBC has put in place a set of strict policies and procedures that must be followed. The good news is that there are various ways that a building project can earn LEED certified.

Here are the various LEED Certification levels:

  • LEED Certified – 40-49 points
  • LEED Silver – 50-59 points
  • LEED Gold – 60-79 points
  • LEED Platinum – 80 points & over

The Materials Resource Credit 7 (MRc7) is a great LEED credit to plan for.

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