The ongoing dialogue about the environmental and health impacts of building products – an important new addition to the push for transparency from BuildingGreen, Inc.
By Alex Wilson
When you buy a box of Cheerios at the supermarket, you know exactly what's in it: each ingredient; the number of calories in a serving; grams of sugar, fat, and protein; milligrams of sodium; and so forth. You also get some sense of what this means for your health—from those "percent daily values" in the nutrition facts box.
Why isn't this sort of information available for the products going into our buildings? We live or work with those building products for years or decades, spending an average of 90 percent of our time indoors. We're not literally eating our building materials, of course, but we would like to know if there's something in the paint, carpeting, or composite countertop that might harm us or the environment. Why can't we get that information?
We can, and we should. The move toward transparency is all about making this information readily available, to help everyone in the industry make more informed choices.
A growing piece of the movement toward "nutrition labels" for building products are environmental product declarations (EPDs), which are designed to inform us about the life-cycle environmental characteristics of products. READ MORE >>
