Orange County's largest private landowner has now become California's largest owner-operator of office workplaces certified under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.
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LEED certification has now been bestowed on 50 Irvine Co. properties spanning nearly 15 million square feet in Orange, San Diego and Los Angeles counties, the Newport Beach-based company announced.
A strict–and expensive–set of guidelines, LEED certification is recognized by business, industry and environmentalists as a benchmark in guaranteeing a structure is truly green.
Billionaire Donald Bren's development and property management giant was able to achieve the distinction through the recent certification of several properties in the LEED Volume Program, which streamlines approval for multiple buildings of a similar type.
The certifications are in LEED's “Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance” category, which rates workplaces on water and energy efficiency, materials and resource management, indoor environmental practices, site management and related criteria.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.