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A Growing Database of Healthier Building Products

The new Declare "nutrition label" and database will streamline the ardous task of finding Living Building Challenge-compliant products.

The Declare label lists ingredients with color coding, making it really easy to see which ingredients might be a concern. Click to enlarge.

Photo Credit: International Living Future Institute

After teasing the Living Building Challenge community for a couple of years with promises of an ingredient label for products, the International Living Future Institute has launched Declare.

The branding and basic premise of the program are as we described back in January, in the Environmental Building News feature article “The Product Transparency Movement: Peeking Behind the Corporate Veil.” While the original description focused on the idea of a product “label,” however, in practice most people will interact with Declare as an online list of red-list-ready products.

How manufacturers get listed

To be listed in the database and sport the label, manufacturers have to report details on what’s in the product and where the materials come from. They also have to pay a listing fee, currently set at $850 for the first year. Annual renewals are half that rate, and there are discounts for multiple listings.

There are only a handful of products on the Declare list at the moment, but the listing fee is a reasonable marketing cost for products that meet the Living Building Challenge criteria, so the list is likely to grow.

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And ILFI makes it easy for teams to use Declare-listed products by simplifying the documentation requirements.

Products in Declare are deemed either “red-list free” or “LBC-compliant.” The latter means that they may contain red-listed ingredients but have been granted an exception allowing their use in LBC projects. Presumably teams using “LBC-compliant” products are still required to write letters to the manufacturers expressing their concern about the offending ingredients.

Synergies with other programs

For LBC projects, Declare serves a specific need and may eventually represent some competition to the much more sophisticated Pharos tool from the Healthy Building Network, which lists ingredients and their health hazards in conjunction with a comprehensive “Chemicals and Materials Library.” (Full disclosure: BuildingGreen markets and sells Pharos subscriptions.) Bill Walsh, executive director of the Healthy Building Network, views it more holistically, however, as “More positive momentum toward disclosure.”

Declare also duplicates some of the functions of the forthcoming Health Product Declaration open standard, and has stated its intention to endorse and support the proliferation of that standard once it is released this November.

Possible overlaps with LEED v4?

With its focus on the LBC red-list, Declare does not appear to be positioned to support compliance with the proposed LEED v4 credit “Building product disclosure and optimization - material ingredients.” In the fifth public comment draft of LEED v4 that credit cites the Green Screen List Translator’s Benchmark 1 hazards, which include many more substances than LBC’s red list.

But products that disclose all their ingredients through Declare can be used to earn partial credit, according to the latest LEED draft.

Declare is smartly positioned to do one thing well. As long as interest continues to grow in product ingredient transparency in general, and in the Living Building Challenge, Declare should grow well along with it.

Published October 4, 2012

(2012, October 4). A Growing Database of Healthier Building Products. Retrieved from https://www.buildinggreen.com/news-article/growing-database-healthier-building-products

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