UL announced a collaboration with the U.S. Green Building Council to develop digital tools that help architects, designers and buyers identify products in UL's SPOT database that contribute to LEED v4 requirements.

The collaboration advances UL and USGBC's shared goal of connecting people to healthier, more sustainable products and environments, and helps streamline and simplify the product selection process.

As part of the partnership, USGBC recognizes UL as a data partner and endorses UL's SPOT database as a tool that LEED Accredited Professionals and other project team members can use to find products that contribute to credits within LEED. SPOT is designed to facilitate product selection for green building projects and is searchable by LEED credit, MasterFormat code, and certification program, and features downloadable product documentation that supports the LEED submittal process.

"UL strives to solve the challenges that architects, designers and purchasers face finding products that help contribute to LEED v4 credits," said Alberto Uggetti, vice president and general manager, UL Environment. "UL's SPOT platform is the largest credible green database in the market and enables users to search more than 50,000 products by the LEED credit they contribute to. This greatly simplifies the LEED design, building and submittal process."

UL launched SPOT in 2016 and it has quickly grown into a credible resource for architects, designers and specifiers to identify sustainable products. SPOT leverages UL's extensive product performance and sustainability data to help purchasers and specifiers find products for their green buildings that they can trust. UL also introduced a free SPOT add-in for AutoDesk Revit, which gives users the ability to access product data from SPOT and assign it directly to their BIM project. The Revit add-in provides greater accuracy and streamlined reporting for green building rating schemes such as U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Certification.

"USGBC is committed to driving sustainable design forward and an important part of that is improving access to green products that help contribute to the LEED green building system," said Mahesh Ramanujam, president and CEO, U.S. Green Building Council. "By collaborating with UL on databases like SPOT, and integrating SPOT with other USGBC partner platforms we will help project teams with an easy to use search capability to access reliable and high quality product data to help sustainable building grow."

As part of the collaboration, USGBC and UL will work together in the future to promote tools that facilitate the selection of LEED products.