During a webinar in May, I talked about the progress made over the last decade in our collective ability to know what is in the products we use in our buildings. For most product categories, we have at least some options that have publicly available information about contents and health. Our “right to know” has been fully asserted and should come as no surprise to even mildly engaged manufacturers.
That webinar helped launch the new HPDC Material Health ToolSuite (link), designed to make accessing and understanding this information easier for busy designers, owners, and contractors that must weigh many aspects beyond health with every product selection decision. We no longer have to build with products and materials whose composition and human-health impacts are a complete mystery.
What hasn’t changed much, and likely won’t anytime soon, is the political appetite for regulating even the worst of chemicals. I don’t think we can wait for the political winds to change direction before acting on the information we do now have access to. The tools and certifications in our harmonized ecosystem, and a coalition of willing manufacturers have given us enough to solve most building challenges while also avoiding the human toll that has been part of our industry for far too long.
HPDC will continue the deliberate work of perfecting material health data reporting. Our new tools will constantly improve. Growing numbers of manufacturers will provide more HPDs and certify more projects through programs like Declare, the Living Product Challenge, and Cradle-to-Cradle. We will continue to share data for research helping to prioritize chemicals that need to be better studied and those that need to be replaced with safe alternatives. We will identify new data fields like the recently added manufacture and extraction locator to help address social inequities in the supply chain.
Toxins, child labor, and slavery cannot be any part of sustainable buildings, no matter how entrenched they seem. As we have seen, our collective action has influenced an incredible shift in the knowledge that is available about building products. Now, if we work together to take the next step of choosing materials optimized for human and environmental health, we will see that change accelerate, too. With growing access to high quality and consistently displayed information, we must, and we can, demand better.