Indoor Environmental Quality

A major tenet of green building design is the improvement of indoor environmental quality. Providing brighter, better-ventilated spaces not only benefits the environment -- by reducing pollutant emissions in workspaces through the use of non-toxic cleaning chemicals, paints, sealants and furniture -- but also improves the productivity of workers in that space. For that reason, we felt it critical to determine the impact LEED buildings have on indoor environmental quality as measured through improvements in worker productivity.

While operational savings are important, the financial benefits in LEED are achieved principally through the enhancement of employee productivity. Salaries represent approximately 90% of the money flow through a building, the rest being amortized construction costs, operations and maintenance, including utilities. Studies in a range of work situations have uncovered productivity increases from green building measures ranging from 1% in manufacturing to more than 25% in a law office. For our estimates of green building benefits from LEED, we assume a conservative range of 1% to 2% productivity increase resulting from the range of the indoor environmental quality measures rewarded by LEED.

Taking an average of the number of employees affected by various features of green buildings, we ascertained that approximately 350,000 employees are currently enjoying improved indoor environments in LEED buildings. Presuming that LEED floor space -- particularly LEED EBOM -- continues to grow through the next 10 to 15 years, the "green building workforce" is expected to exceed 5 million by 2015, becoming 9 million strong by 2020.

While the "green building workforce" figures are in themselves compelling, the rubber meets the road from a benefits perspective in terms of productivity gains. While environmental impacts should not necessarily require economic justification, financial gains need to be demonstrated in order for the market to continue to demand green buildings.

Our analysis suggests a noticeably greener hue of green buildings, namely in the form of monetary savings. We calculated that $120 million to $250 million already has been saved through productivity gains of the green building workforce. Given continued growth in green buildings, we expect this number to grow significantly in the future: reaching between roughly $1.7 billion and $3.5 billion by 2015, and between nearly $3.2 billion and $6.4 billion by 2020.