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Becoming a LEED AP requires you to pass an exam. USGBC offers several tools to help you achieve that, including exam outlines, LEED reference guides to study, and optional workshops, courses and webinars to help you increase your knowledge on green building practice and design.

Concrete and Green Building
There is no "one right way" to build green, and LEED recognizes the wide variety of strategies that can be used to create more sustainable structures. The important thing to ensure that a building's structure, systems and operations all work together for the greenest possible outcome is for all the key players to work together from the beginning, also known as integrated design. That can include concrete contractors.

Perhaps one of concrete's biggest contributions to green building is its recyclability. In cradle-to-cradle considerations — that is, thinking about a new building's sustainability while it's new, as it ages and whether its components can find new life when the building itself has reached the end of its life — it's important to think about how recyclable building materials are.

The Southern California Gas Company reused an existing building for its Energy Resource Center and found it economically beneficial, saving an estimates $3.2 million. Concrete recycling was among the materials that resulted in those savings: The company estimates recycled concrete represented a 49 percent savings. Concrete recycling typically is in the form of crushed concrete, which can be used in other building projects for such uses as fill.

Concrete itself can be made of reused materials. One of the most-common recycled components used in concrete is fly ash, a residue created in the combustion of coal. Fly ash is a pollutant when released into the environment, but when captured in chimneys at power-generation facilities, it can be used as part of cement mixtures.