Harbor Hills Green LEED and USGB certified home

Harbor Hills is proud to be building the Carlyle residence one of Lake County’s first L.E.E.D. certified homes right here is BellaVista. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) consists of a suite of rating systems for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings, homes and neighborhoods. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and spearheaded by Robert K. Watson, Founding Chairman LEED Steering Committee from 1995 until 2006, LEED is intended to provide building owners and operators a concise framework for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions. Since its inception in 1998, the U.S. Green Building Council[4] has grown to encompass more than 7,000 projects in the United States and 30 countries, covering over 1.501 billion square feet (140 km²) of development area.[5] The hallmark of LEED is that it is an open and transparent process where the technical criteria proposed by USGBC members are publicly reviewed for approval by the almost 20,000 member organizations that currently constitute the USGBC. The Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) was established by USGBC to provide a series of exams to allow individuals to become accredited for their knowledge of the LEED rating system. This is recognized through either the LEED Accredited Professional (LEED AP) or LEED Green Associate[6] (LEED Green Assoc.) designation. GBCI also provides third-party certification for projects pursuing LEED. The goal of the LEED performance credit system is to allocate points "based on the potential environmental impacts and human benefits of each credit." To weight these impacts, the USGBC relies upon the environmental impact categories of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Tools for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and Other Environmental Impacts (TRACI) as a basis for weighting each credit.[9] LEED 2009 makes reference to the environmental-impact weighting scheme developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in assigning credit weights. USGB stands for United States Green Building. Currently there are no homes in Lake County Florida that have been certified. Harbor Hills is proud to be building the first LEED certified home in our area.