SmithGroup uses HPDs in its selection process for projects large and small, including the million-square-foot MGM National Harbor Resort near Washington, D.C. HKS was the design architect.
Image: HKS and SmithGroup

Material Health

Buildings shouldn’t harm their occupants. Is anything more fundamental than that? Yet many building materials contain toxic substances with the potential to make people sick. Finding and interpreting material health information is an emerging practice among building professionals.

Understand why it’s important

Begin with Why Chemical Transparency Matters, written by BuildingGreen’s editors.

Go deeper

For a deeper dive, jump to the key concepts below, or explore our product guides.

Why Chemical Transparency Matters

Many manufacturers and trade groups have resisted disclosing which chemicals are in their products: they suggest design professionals should stick with designing buildings and let suppliers and manufacturers manage the chemical side of things.

Then why is it important for design professionals to know what’s in the products we’re specifying?

REASON 1

There may be too many chemical cooks

The Health Product Declaration (HPD) gives us a chemical inventory of a building product and characterizes the level of concern about each ingredient.

Although other data reporting formats may allude to human health effects, they fall short. Reference to toxicity in environmental product declarations (EPDs), for example, looks at health in a fairly indirect way. It focuses on public health impacts from manufacturing and not on toxic substances in the materials themselves. The safety data sheet (SDS) was created to warn first responders about what they might be dealing with in case of a chemical spill or other crisis.

But we are becoming more aware of our sensitivities to long-term, low-level chemical exposures. One recent study noted that 30 different chemicals present in common household dust all could be contributing to obesity. None on its own was present in significant quantities, but researchers think that in combination, they could be asserting a surprisingly strong effect. Another recent study looked at how multiple chemicals, each in small quantities on its own, could be combining into a carcinogenic “soup.”

HPDs can help address these effects by bringing to light small chemical quantities and giving us more data to analyze for patterns.

REASON 2

Transparency is a means to an end

Suppose you had to choose between a world in which all products are disclosed and one in which all products are optimized for minimal health impact and maximum performance. You would choose optimization, right?

You wouldn’t know it from transparency opponents, but that’s not our choice to make. We need transparency to get to optimization, and there will never be a land of unicorns and rainbows where everything is optimized.

Look at the U.S. Green Building Council’s experience in developing LEED v4. USGBC signaled clearly in early development of the system that it wanted to encourage avoidance of chemicals of concern. It also wants to move its materials and resources credits toward life-cycle assessment and away from single-issue credits.

With both issues, though, it found out that it could only make token rules because, fundamentally, the building industry lacks data. We need massive generation of disclosure data to tell us exactly what we’re dealing with—before we can really start thinking about optimization.

We commend companies that are ahead of the curve and already optimizing. But for this to scale across the rest of the industry and start showing widespread results in our buildings, we need more data.

REASON 3

Disclosure changes products

With the transparency movement several years old, we’re hearing lots of stories from manufacturers who, simply by looking to find out what’s in their products and characterize the hazard levels of any chemicals, have found that asking questions leads to change.

For architects who have asked for products with HPDs, having those conversations with manufacturers is a clear way of communicating an interest in health without boxing those companies into solutions that aren’t a good fit.

We’d like to see more companies optimize formally, but the on-the-fly optimization that happens through asking questions is more accessible as an everyday practice.

Material Health

Understand why it’s important

Go deeper