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Jim Mark, CEO of Melvin Mark Cos., knew he would commit to Earth-friendly practices for the renovation of his company’s 30-year-old Columbia Square office building in downtown Portland.

After all, Melvin Mark was one of the first Oregon companies to use the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design practices when it developed Salem’s transit center in 1997.
But rather than follow LEED, Mark chose the Green Building Institute’s Green Globes certification process.

鈥淔or existing buildings, Green Globes was a better fit for us,鈥� Mark said.

The Green Globe, more popular in Canada, is a third-party evaluator like LEED. Mark said his biggest reason for choosing Green Globe was to increase the involvement of the company’s in-house engineering and green teams in the project to update the 313,000-square-foot Columbia Square building.

LEED remains the benchmark for green building standards, and Mark intends to keep using the certification for new projects. But the emergence of alternative third-party evaluators gives engineers, architects and developers options to meet sustainability goals.

LEED, Green Globe and the International Living Building Institute’s Living Building Challenage will push the building industry to new standards as each organization refines its goals and establishes new trends in green building.

The U.S. Green Building Council and the International Living Building Institute are already updating their certification requirements, and preliminary drafts give some hints as to the coming trends. Those changes are expected to help boost the green market in nonresidential construction from 2 percent in 2005, to between 20 and 25 percent by 2013.

One way the U.S. Green Building Council expects those figures to increase is by updating its five-year strategic plan to capitalize on the attention now being given to green building. Some of the issues it wants to address from 2009 to 2013 include: removing roadblocks to a growing demand for green building by increasing the number of LEED qualified people in the building trades; addressing the need for green practices within existing buildings; and giving building owners and occupants the education needed to manage, operate and inhabit green buildings.

The International Living Building Institute also is updating its Living Building Challenge, an ambitious attempt to spur development of buildings that internally generate power and treat water. While the U.S. Green Building Council gives developers a checklist to achieve certain LEED standards, the Living Building Challenge uses LEED as a baseline and lets architects creatively design buildings that generate their own power and handle their own water, said Bruce Hostetter, outreach director for the challenge. The next user guide for meeting the challenge will be unveiled in November.

To date, no building has reached the Living Building standard, but Hostetter said two projects 鈥� one in New York and one in Missouri 鈥� are being reviewed and are expected to hit the standard.

Hostetter said that while studies show that building to meet a LEED silver standard costs the same or slightly more than not, achieving the Living Building Challenge will cost more 鈥� anywhere from 5 to 50 percent more. That cost increase remains one of the biggest hurdles to achieving the Living Building Challenge.

鈥淚t’s refreshing to know there are those folks out there willing to take that kind of financial risk,鈥� Hostetter said. 鈥淭hey’re not doing Living Building because it’s fashionable.鈥�

Mark puts his company in that category, saying sustainable practices have been part of Melvin Mark since the 1990s. Updating the Columbia Square building included installation of a $500,000 chiller. The investment is expected to generate a $35,000 annual savings in heating and cooling costs. Melvin Mark also implemented a program for tenants to recycle paper, metal, leftover food and construction debris.

鈥淚 think there could be multiple levels for other rating systems,鈥� Mark said. 鈥淎s long as it’s achievable and it makes sense. That will drive the process.鈥�