Better Living With Chemicals (live from Greenbuild)

I seem to be on the chemical redlist circuit this month.

Last night at GreenBuild I attended Perkins + Will's panel-and-schmooze event to discuss their brand new precautionary list of 25 chemicals that P+W wants to see out of building products. They've created a publicly available website with their avoid list and you can view the list by MasterFormat divisions, or by health effect, not just by chemical. So instead of glazing over while scanning a list of chemicals, a designer can quickly skip to say, Div 07 and find 14 chemicals to watch out for AND a list of alternative materials. P+W is already actively scrubbing the listed chemicals out of their material libraries and specs in favor of alternatives.

Last week I spoke at the Toxics Use Reduction Institute's 20th anniversary conference. TURI and the TUR Act is a model for pragmatic work helping manufacturers in Massachusetts reduce toxics in their processes and products and adopt alternatives that make sense. I spoke about how GreenSpec deals with known and unknown chemical and other constituent hazards in evaluating products (more on that sometime post-Greenbuild) — and also heard some of the latest research on health impacts of nano materials...

As the P+W panel was discussing, a lot comes down to how you deal with what we DON'T know. That's because there's a lot more unknown than known: Few of the some 80 thousand chemicals in use today have been thoroughly tested for environmental, health, and safety; many product constituents are considered trade secret or just too small in quantity to be on the MSDS; and we're discovering that certain classes of compounds (endocrine disrupters, nano materials) don't follow our general understanding of how harm occurs.

Do we ignore what we don't know or do we actively acknowledge this uncertainty as part of making the best decisions we can? When a design firms steps in to lead — and share — in the way Perkins + Will is doing here, it raises the bar.

Next up on the circuit is Pharos — I keep hearing rumors about their new online chemical database. Sometime in the Greenbuild whirlwind I'll make it to their booth for a tour.