News Brief

Parking Garages Get Their Own Sustainability Certification

A new standard for greener parking incentivizes site, energy, and resilience measures.

Kaiser Permanente and other building owners are working to make parking garages greener; a new certification system could help standardize such practices as green walls and renewable energy.

Photo: M.O. Stevens. License: CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Green Parking Council (GPC), an affiliate of the International Parking Institute, recently launched the Green Garage Certification Program. The program, according to GPC, is the parking industry’s equivalent of LEED certification—a rating system for sustainable parking facility design.

The idea of a green parking garage might strike some as an oxymoron, but GPC says that its standard differentiates facilities, and since LEED specifically excludes standalone garages, the niche is open. “Green Garage Certification applies a holistic approach to garage performance and sustainability,” said GPC executive director Paul Wessel. Each facility will be evaluated based on its achievement on a menu of standards developed by experts from a range of related fields, according to Wessel.

GPC will evaluate garages based on categories such as energy efficiency, energy resilience, access to mass transit and other alternative transportation options, stormwater management, and cleaning practices. Metrics for parking facility evaluation are broken down into a point-based system, and GPC will offer three levels of certification­—bronze, silver, and gold—based on scoring. GPC also announced the release of a 195-page book, Green Garage Certification Standard, defining performance measures and documentation requirements for certification. 

For more information:

Green Parking Council

greenparkingcouncil.

Published June 18, 2014

Nick, D. (2014, June 18). Parking Garages Get Their Own Sustainability Certification . Retrieved from https://www.buildinggreen.com/newsbrief/parking-garages-get-their-own-sustainability-certification

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July 1, 2015 - 10:13 am

From an email BuildingGreen received this morning:

The first seven parking facilities to achieve Green Garage Certification are: Bank of America Plaza, Los Angeles

BG Group Place, Houston

Canopy Airport Parking, Denver

Charles Square Garage, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Forest Home Garage, Ithaca, New York

Silver Spring Metro Plaza, Silver Spring, Maryland

Westpark Corporate Center, Tysons Corner, Virginia