Legrand North and Central America today announced the company’s West Hartford, Connecticut corporate headquarters has become LEED Certified. The facility is mixed-use with office and manufacturing space located in a residential neighborhood of a large suburban area. The campus consists of five connected buildings with the original structure being built almost 100 years ago. The facility has a total of 262,690-square-feet of space and the ability to accommodate up to 650 employees at capacity.

The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), is the foremost program for buildings, homes, and communities that seek to design, construct, maintain and operate for improved environmental and human health performance.  More than 92,000 commercial and institutional projects are currently participating in LEED, comprising more than 19.3 billion square feet of construction space in all 50 states and more than 167 countries and territories.

Legrand chose to pursue certification through the LEED performance pathway in Arc using LEED v4 Building Operations and Maintenance: Existing Buildings (LEED O+M: Existing Buildings) as it presented an opportunity to leverage several years of efforts by the company to improve the environmental performance of its North and Central American headquarters.  Through Arc, the digital performance platform that helps benchmark, measure and improve sustainability performance, project teams pursuing LEED certification can utilize actual building performance data to achieve points. Energy, waste, water, human experience and transportation data is collected and reported to calculate a performance score in comparison to similar facilities.Out of 100 possible points, the West Hartford facility scored 48 under the LEED rating system, which included 46 points from the building performance and two additional base points for achievements in both lighting and sustainable cleaning. The minimum points required for certification is 40.

“Obtaining LEED certification for our West Hartford facility is a major achievement for our entire company,” stated John Selldorff, President and CEO, Legrand North and Central America. “I’d like to commend the tireless efforts of the team tasked with driving this initiative and all the employees that play a role in the day-to-day sustainability efforts of the building. We hope our accomplishment will serve as an inspiration to others that operate in older, mixed-used facilities to know that LEED certification is within their reach.”

“Market transformation happens one building at a time. Legrand North and Central America understands the value of LEED and has exemplified extraordinary leadership in reshaping their sector,” said Mahesh Ramanujam, President and CEO, USGBC. “The success of LEED is due to the partnership and support of those committed to advancing green building and sustainability. Each new LEED certification is one step closer to revolutionizing the environment in which we live, work and play.”  www.legrand.us.