Although the design standard is widely followed in office building construction, it has not made much inroad with data centers. Only eight data centers are certified in the United States, and 17 others are in line for certification, says the building council. L.L. Bean's data center was certified last year and Emerson expects to be certified as well.

LEED is primarily a set of design standards used in building a facility, and any number of things can earn "points" in a design. It can affect everything from a building footprint, such as the two story design of L.L. Bean's data center to minimize the impact on the land, to installing bike racks to encourage bicycle commuting.

Emerson built a 35,000 square-foot data center as part of a project to consolidate IT operations spread across 135 data centers. Any facility a with dedicated UPS and cooling system was counted as a data center and the company plans to reduce its IT operations to four centers located worldwide, according to Steve Hassel, the CIO of Emerson.

Emerson's consolidation project didn't begin with the standard in mind. The company wanted energy efficiency and decided to use LEED as plans developed. The benefits of this approach added up, Hassel said.

For instance, instead of one dumpster to handle all the construction debris, there were five dumpsters placed side-by-side, each with a designated waste for recycling. That alone led to a more than 80% reduction in waste that would have otherwise gone to the landfill, said Hassel.