Are there any sustainable materials? What does that even mean?

Near the end of another exciting and exhausting Greenbuild, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with three other women deeply invested in sustainable material management: Lindsay James, InterfaceFlor; Gail Vittori, Center for Maximum Building Potential Building Systems, and Sarah Brooks, Natural Step Canada. We started the session with the question "Are there any sustainable materials?" and ended with the question " What does material stewardship look like in a sustainable society?"

In between these two questions lives a world of aspiration and complexity followed, if you're lucky--or defiant--by deeper aspiration. The thing is, this stuff is hard. It's complicated and can be messy. Simple answers can lead to different problems. The deeper answers we need to figure out together--no one can single-handedly provide the roadmap.

There's already been a lot of excellent debate around the new LEED Pilot Credit 43. I find myself agreeing with both sides! Here's where I stand in what may be the eye of the storm.

LEED is supposed to be about buildings--and market transformation

On the one hand, LEED is fundamentally supposed to be about designing high-performing green buildings, and product and material selection is one integrated component. It's not supposed to be about cobbling together a building out of greener products and materials. If the core purpose gets lost amidst the debate surrounding one material (yes, I'm talking FSC/SFI), we all lose.

On the other hand, LEED is at this point a major market driver for green building products. We need to use all the levers we can find to create truly sustainable manufacturing and sourcing if we're ever going to make it through these pivotal times into a vibrant, thriving, truly sustainable world. So we ought to use LEED for all it's worth in pushing real substantive improvements down through the supply chain.

Based on its own videos, the Arizona-based maker of recycled-denim Ultratouch insulation still doesn't get it when it comes to installation quality. 

What do you do when a green product doesn't live up to expectations? Here at BuildingGreen, we really want to see green building products succeed in the marketplace, and make it easy for professionals to find the best of the best in our GreenSpec guide.

But when we see something substandard, we feel it's important to point it out. To win the mainstream over to sustainability, we have to deliver on promises of reduced environmental burdens along with superior performance.

A little while back, I took Bonded Logic to task for flaws its Ultratouch cotton batt design and installation process.

The problems with Ultratouch

New, improved guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about how to deal with a broken compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) are intended to take some of the mystery out of the purchase and use of CFLs. But by suggesting a response that borders on Hazmat lockdown, the guidelines may potentially add to consumers' uncertainties.

While CFLs have become more popular and less expensive in recent years, they still enjoy only around a quarter of the total market share for residential light bulbs--perhaps in part because of exaggerated reports about mercury toxicity and the difficulty of cleanup and disposal, some of which have prompted debunking sites like Snopes.com to clear the air. The average bulb contains around 5 mg of mercury, about 100 times less than an old-fashioned oral thermometer.

Still, mercury in any quantity should not be taken lightly, particularly in a home where children or pets live. Mercury in fish and other foods is a serious issue, but mercury vapor is even more toxic. Ingested mercury is not well absorbed by the body, while in contrast, inhaled mercury enters the bloodstream readily.

Architects, designers, engineers and others who need an affordable, comprehensive, flexible tool for specifying green building products will benefit from the a strategic partnership we just announced at Greenbuild. BuildingGreen will link our Web-based green products resource, GreenSpec, with the Healthy Building Network's Pharos Project to provide one trusted, authoritative, independent source for specifying green building products, information, and research.

GreenSpec provides a listing of approved products and guidance on how best to use those products in green buildings. Pharos scores products in specific categories based on what they're made of, in a highly transparent, data-rich tool. Our customers have asked to see the capabilities of GreenSpec and Pharos in one place, combining the in-depth research opportunities of Pharos with the direct advice offered by GreenSpec, and we believe this strategic partnership is the best response to their needs.

Figuring out the structure of concrete at the molecular level will go a long way toward greening this ubiquitous building material. Photo: Michael David Rose Photography.

When I began researching concrete for last month’s EBN feature article "Reducing Environmental Impacts of Cement and Concrete," one of my goals was to figure out how toxins are bound within concrete’s structure. I naively assumed that after over the 2000 years or so that concrete’s been in use, we had figured out everything there is to know about the material. How wrong I was.