Strategies for LEED-NC-Certified Projects in Germany and Results of Their Life Cycle Assessment

The aim of this study was to investigate strategies for the certification of environmentally friendly office buildings in Germany. A total of 39 LEED-NC gold-certified office space projects were ranked according to their "optimize energy performance" credit (EAc1) achievements from the energy and atmosphere (EA) category and divided into two groups: 13 projects (group 1) with the highest and 13 projects (group 2) with the lowest EAc1 achievements. Nonparametric statistics were used to evaluate the differences between groups 1 and 2. A two-stage nested analysis of variance test was used to evaluate the differences between the two groups in terms of their life cycle assessment (LCA). A comparison of the two groups showed that group 1 outperformed group 2 in the EA category (p < 0.0001). However, in the other LEED categories, the differences between the two groups were not significant (p = 0.0761). As a result, group 1 outperformed group 2 in terms of overall LEED points (p = 0.0048). The LCA of EAc1 showed that group 1 enacted the lowest environmental damage when compared to group 2 (p = 0.0040). The environmental assessment of LEED-certified projects can help green building managers choose the most sustainable certification strategy.