Beijing's Olympic village gets a gold for green building

Beijing hasn't medaled in air quality, but athletes at the 2008 Olympic Games are staying at a first-of-its-kind, environmentally friendly Olympic village. 

The temporary home to 6,000-plus athletes and officials has been awarded LEED-Gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council under its pilot Neighborhood Development program.

The feature-oriented rating system awards buildings points for satisfying specified green building criteria, such as using sustainable materials. Think bamboo instead of hardwood.   

The village scored high enough to win itself the gold, which is not quite the top spot in this particular competition. That would be platinum.

-- Lauren Beale

Photo: Teh Eng Koon / AFP/Getty Images

Thoughts? Comments? E-mail lauren.beale@latimes.com

Comments

[Rep. Mike]

Ahh nothing like covering up all of your country atrocities and outright war against the environment with a new fake environmental rating system for a small community. I also doubt very seriously that any building in Beijing could get a gold rating as sustainable development also includes access to sustainable water supplies. No such thing as green building in Beijing or Southern California :(.

LEED Certified
Rep. Mike

[Dan Meyer]

There is absolutely nothing green about bamboo relative to hardwoods...do your homework instead of jumping on the latest brainless environmental bandwagon. Bamboo is a potential environmental nightmare. Even mainstream greens are recognizing their error in giving bamboo a blanket pass into green building...only the media keeps buying the story.

[Dan Meyer]

That's funny. Before you can submit a comment, the system asks you to input the secret code shown below, which "prevents automatic robots from posting comments." What protections are in place to prevent robotic journalists from automatically reposting the same tired stories without doing even the basic journalistic due diligence?