This new task group was funded in part by a $3 million grant the Washington-based U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) received from Google to support the Material Ingredients credit in LEED v4, which rewards transparency of a product’s composition and finds alternatives to harmful substances.
“The first path is really understanding what’s in your product,” explains Stacy Glass, vice president, built environment, at the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute in San Francisco. “Transparency is really the first step. But what we all want here—what specifiers want—the reason we’re doing all of this is because we want healthier products, and that’s a long and difficult path for manufacturers.” (See “What’s in Your Chemical Soup?”, page 4, for more.)
Glass believes optimizing products to remove toxic or harmful ingredients will be the “next frontier” in sustainable market transformation—a journey on which the USGBC has already embarked by integrating the MR credits into LEED v4 that reward product optimization.
“At a macro level, what we’re trying to do here is enable more informed decision making,” says Brendan Owens, vice president, LEED Technical Development, for the USGBC. “We’re not just doing this on material health, although that is a very strong focus for the USGBC now and, really, kind of always has been. But we’re finding different avenues to express that priority.”
For the USGBC, those priorities emerge in three areas of disclosure, according to Owens, which include the environmental footprint of a product (expressed through an environmental product declaration, or EPD); raw material sourcing (identifying where a product’s raw materials come from); and the health impacts of materials (which manifest themselves as a Health Product Declaration, or HPD).
“When you look at whole-building LCA [Life Cycle Assessment], you’re comparing and contrasting and optimizing decisions—what you’re going to make your building out of, how you’re going to frame the structure—and those decisions have ramifications. We want project teams to use tools that enable them to make more informed decisions that lead to better outcomes,” Owens says. “And then looking longer term, instead of using each of those tools in isolation of each other and optimizing around any particular, single attribute—EPD, HPD and raw material sourcing—use them in conjunction with each other to make a much more informed decision down the line.”
Hurdles to Transparency
Much like in the early days of the LEED rating system, this new movement toward transparency has been met with some resistance; market transformation of this kind is rarely a smooth undertaking given the sheer magnitude and complexity of the issues at hand—not to mention stakeholders who want nothing less than to maintain the status quo.