Green construction in civil engineering instruction

Teaching sustainability in civil engineering curriculum fulfills ABET 2000 Outcome 3c and the codes of ethics of NSPE and ASCE. The US Green Building Council (USGBC) has published the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria since 1998. LEED is an optional criteria in private construction and is mandated or encouraged by many federal, state, and local governments for public construction projects. Learning about LEED criteria will help to prepare civil engineers to understand how civil systems interact with and operate in a more complementary manner with the natural world as well as to reduce water, energy, and material usage. The authors describe the process of learning about the LEED v3 (2009) criteria to apply it to two existing buildings to build a scorecard. In the process of building the scorecard, the authors learned about sustainable construction techniques. Future guidance on applications of the LEED criteria across the undergraduate civil engineering curriculum is discussed.