I’ve been struggling a bit to come up with this quarter’s “Thoughts….” I knew I wanted to neatly explain why HPDC is so important and the primary focus of my extracurricular energies for the last decade and a half. Then, this morning, a coworker said he’d heard on the radio that cancer risks in “Cancer Alley” – that 85-mile stretch of petrochemical plants from New Orleans to Baton Rouge – are 7 times higher than the national average. This led me to new research using mobile labs to measure air pollution throughout this region that says we’re significantly underestimating that risk.

As we’ve known since Rachel Carson’s time, the beneficiaries of polluting industries and their government enablers bank on narrow data that assumes otherwise completely healthy people are subjected to just one toxin at a time, so no harm is done as long as we keep that below some magical threshold. This is ridiculous, of course, because we’re all subject to many toxins in the air, soil, and water. This is compounded with devastating effects on those unfortunate souls, maybe living in family homes predating the chemical plants and without the financial capacity to simply pack up and move, who send their children to school hundreds of feet from these facilities.

This is certainly not new information to me, but serves as a succinct reminder that my reasons are not complicated. Chemical companies and governments will not protect us, especially the most vulnerable. But those of us making decisions about what we build with have the power to do something. We long ago realized that only with adequate knowledge can we make decisions, as manufacturers, builders, designers, and owners, that avoid the worst effects and drive change towards healthier outcomes for everyone.

Providing this information for every building product is HPDC’s purpose. With HPDs covering tens of thousands of products, we’ve come a long way. We have much more to do; to enhance what we know about some products and learn what we still don’t know about others, to reach further down the supply chain, to reduce the number of chemical unknowns, and to understand how to make better choices with this information.

We bank on the broad notion that enough of us care to create a world where the benefits of some do not cause the suffering of others. HPDC, with “Collaborative” very intentionally in our name, knows we can’t do this alone. Our board, technical committee, and technical subgroups have provided the primary forums for representatives from across the material health ecosystem to sort out the many nuances of collecting and using this information. With equal intention we’ve kept HPDs free to access and inexpensive to generate.

Having well established methods for collecting health information, we are expanding the Builder to cover the full breadth of the Common Materials Framework, AIA Materials Pledge, and LEED v5 Materials Credit. We will be sharing the importance of material transparency beyond the commercial building sector. And, our ecosystem partners are becoming more sophisticated in their capabilities to make this information actionable to project teams, manufacturers, and researchers.

So, my message is simply this: In the drive to eliminate the need for toxic chemistry, HPDC plays a central role. If you haven’t already, please join us.