Red List Mania: Three Ways to Make Chemical Avoidance Guides Work Better

This Venn diagram shows the overlap of various "red lists" that recommend chemicals to exclude from building products. Courtesy Healthy Building Network

A "red list" of chemicals is supposed to make the screening process simple. But with so many red lists popping up, which ones should you trust?

If you're one of the many people becoming increasingly concerned about chemical hazards found in building products, you might turn to a "red list" of chemicals for help in your screening process. Red lists have been proliferating, and whose should you trust?

How does the Living Building Challenge red list of chemical hazards match up with the list associated with the LEED Pilot Credit 11? What's covered by the Perkins+Will Precautionary list that isn't covered by the others?

Visualizing the complexities

Tom Lent from Healthy Building Network (HBN) has given me liberty to share this incredible Venn diagram that he developed, in which he's shown a host of pertinent chemical hazard lists and how they relate to each other.

I want to share it here not just because it's an amazing diagram that anyone who cares about these issues should have on hand, but also to illustrate a few additional points.

For one, the chart shows how attention to chemical hazard concerns has increased over the years--and how far behind federal regulators are in addressing these concerns. The U.S. EPA is currently extremely limited in its ability to regulate hazards. There are numerous efforts to address the situation at the state level, but national efforts like Senator Lautenberg's Safe Chemicals Act bill, move a lot slower.

Red-listing is harder than it looks

The design community has stepped up to fill in the gap. Green Guide for Health Care, Perkins+Will Precautionary list, the Living Building Challenge, and most recently, LEED, have all provided their own lists. There are more lists that we could challenge Tom to artfully add to his diagram. Many standards and certifications for green building products also use red lists--but they're each somewhat unique in both the chemicals on the list and the rules about when and how those lists are used. (For more detail on that, see our special report Green Building Product Certifications, and the EBN article What's New in Multi-Attribute Environmental Certifications.)

Closer to home, our company's GreenSpec guide to green building products doesn't use a red list per se --there isn't a list of chemicals that automatically knocks outs a product. No, not even PVC--a common target of red lists. We keep an eye out for all the hazards captured in this diagram, but what we do with that information depends on what else is a key concern for the product category, the degree of hazard represented, and how bad the alternatives are.