Flowcrete North America, a subsidiary of Flowcrete Group plc, announced today that it has joined the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) as a product manufacturer.

“Membership in USGBC will allow Flowcrete to play a more active role in advocating green building issues. We strongly believe that we have a responsibility to our community to be good corporate citizens,” said Tony Crowell, Managing Director of Flowcrete North America.

USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green building Rating SystemTM has become the national paradigm for the design and construction of high performance, sustainable buildings. It is a point-based system developed by the United States Green Building Council (USBGC) to rate a building's environmental performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: Sustainable Site development (SS), Water Efficiency (WE), Energy Efficiency (EA), Material Selection (MR) and Indoor Environmental Quality (EQ). Green building certification at various levels can be achieved by accumulating the required amount of LEED credits.

Despite the purely voluntary nature of LEED certification, the green building sector continues to grow exponentially. Developers, owners and operators are increasingly demanding green designs, which not only have a positive impact on the environment and public health, but also reduce operating costs and enhance building marketability. “As a manufacturer, we feel obliged to generate products that contribute significantly to the overall sustainability equation in the building industry,” Crowell said. “The overwhelming majority of our products are already ‘low VOC’ or ‘VOC-free’ and we continue to explore additional water-based technologies.”

“A prominent display of the USGBC logo on our website and publication materials will help communicate our commitment to green building to our customers, explains Marketing Coordinator, Sheryl Kunning. “As suppliers, we are in unique position for building customer awareness; USGBC provides a wealth of information that we can internalize and use to educate our customers from contractors to specifiers.”

Flowcrete offers a variety of concrete coatings from epoxies to methyl methacrylates that meet or exceed the VOC criteria specified in the LEED New Construction Rating System designed to guide and distinguish high-performance commercial and institutional projects.

For more information, please contact us at usa@flowcrete.com or visit us on the web at www.flowcrete.us

Additional information can be found on the USBGC website at www.usgbc.org