Rating System

LEED O+M: Existing Buildings

Rating System Version

v3 - LEED 2009, v3 - LEED 2008, v2 - LEED 2.0

Inquiry

Our project is an electronics manufacturing facility. In order to reduce the impact to indoor air quality and improve the working environment of the employees, we are in the process of switching to more IAQ friendly building-related products such as carpet, paints, coating, sealants, etc, which helps us pursue MRc3. Further more, during the manufacturing process we have reduced VOCs as much as we can without affecting product quality. We also have procedures and policies in place to continually strive for further reductions as they become available, and have the correct engineering controls to prevent air contamination inside the building. Although LEED does not directly address process-related materials and substances, we think these are the proper things to do in order to provide a better environment for the building occupants. However, at this point, we do use several products that contain VOCs (conformal coating and solvents mostly) but we have significantly reduced VOC amounts (>75%) through chemical substitutions and process eliminations. Those VOCs we do still have are used in areas with proper ventilation (such as fume hoods or inside enclosed and vented equipment) to ensure minimal exposure to employees and immediate venting to the outside of the building. Our 3rd party industrial hygiene survey results prove that the VOC exposure levels for employees are extremely low (