The LEED rating system stands out from other green building standards in that it puts an equal amount of importance on the health and happiness of the indoor occupants of a structure as it does on its impact on the environment. Achieving LEED certification for your project can be a difficult and time consuming process, mostly because of all of the paperwork involved. You have to get very detailed about all of the wood you use and every adhesive applied. However, there are a lot of things that can help you achieve LEED credits that you don't necessarily list in your paperwork. These tools can make life much easier and can be considered the “unsung heroes” of green building.

Let’s start with the Grindzilla (http://www.grindzilla.com/) think of it as a wood chipper that you can put pieces of a house into. One of the first credits you encounter in the construction phase of a LEED project is the Construction Waste Management credit which requires that you divert as much demolition and construction debris as possible from landfills. A minimum of 50% is required for 1 point and 75% for two. That means that concrete, asphalt, wood members, insulation, piping, etc... either has to be recycled or reused in some fashion. Some areas are lucky enough to having carting companies that will either provide you with three dumpsters on site and you can separate things just as you would separate bottles and paper at home, or they will take it all in one dumpster and sort it off site.  Some places don’t have access to services like this and that’s where Grindzilla comes into play. You can throw just about anything into and get a material you can reuse immediately on site. Framing members can be turned into a substrate for walking paths, mulching, and erosion control. Gypsum can be used in Portland cement or as a spill cleanup agent. The Grindzilla also separates nails out so you get clean fill and the nails themselves can be recycled by a metal scrapper.

Then as a planning tool you have something like RoofRay (http://www.roofray.com/). Basically you are presented with a Google Maps satellite image. You find your home or building on the map, then draw out where the roof surface is and what pitch it has. RoofRay will tell you the potential you have for producing solar energy, saving you a lot of time and effort.

You can use any number of different sun meters when planning a project to figure out what part of a piece of land gets the best and strongest sunlight. Or if you're making biodiesel on site for use in cars or to run boilers, you should check out the iSPEC q-100 (http://www.paradigmsensors.com/), a hand held biodiesel purity analyzer.

The point is that building green will often require you think outside the box and usually you'll have to work backwards from your end goal to get to a solution that makes building green easy and cost effective.

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Learn more about LEED Pro here.

Visit Ari’s current development project, the Water Mill Ateliers here.