The U.S. EPA, the European Union Commission on the Environment, the State of California are among the government organizations that have come out on the side of healthy materials for our built environment. In addition, there are a growing number of associations and firms engaged in collecting data on toxic materials that should be avoided, sharing their information with the public. They include the Healthy Building Network ‘s Pharos Project, Clean Production Action, Perkins + Will’s Precautionary List, Living Building Challenge and that organization’s Watch List, and the various LEED programs, such as HC and Pilot.

Most recently, the first open standard format for reporting the content and hazards in building products was launched at Greenbuild 2012. Called the Health Product Declaration (HPD) Open Standard Version 1, the program is managed by a non-profit group of collaborators. The HPD Collaborative is lead by the Pilot Project Committee of 29 building product manufacturers and 50 expert reviewers from across the building industry. The collaborative is in the process of developing, maintaining, and evolving the HPD Open Standard to meet the growing demand from the design and specifying community for health information on the many products used in our buildings. Included in this pilot group is the Canadian furniture manufacturer Teknion. In an effort to build the case for HPD, starting from the supplier’s point of view, I asked Tracy Backus, LEED AP ID+C, director of sustainability programs at Teknion U.S. to answer a few questions. Here she talks about what one manufacturer is doing to safeguard human health, and the Earth that gives us life.

Susan S. Szenasy: As a member of the Health Product Declaration (HPD) Working Group, in the manufacturing sector, and with Teknion’s long-term commitment to environmental health, could you tell us why your firm has decided to join this particular group? And what are your hopes for outcomes?

Tracy Backus: We were asked by Google to participate originally.  As we looked more closely at our history and how Teknion has already made steps to reduce chemicals from our products, like PVC, it was a natural for us to begin the work of full disclosure to the public. The challenge was developing a method that worked for all manufactures of building materials. That is the work of the HPD.

SSS: I understand you heard about HPD from a client, Google, in search of more transparency in products’ chemical/material content, as these relate to human health effects. What was Google looking for?

TB: Google is aligning its business to protect the health and well-being of it’s employees by building and procuring products that eliminate chemicals of concern, identified by the EPA, Living Building Challenge, and the National Cancer Institute. They are investing and, therefore, expect the same of manufacturers to advance the industry to research and develop safer materials for the built environment. Read more…

In the inaugural post of our series on social sustainability, we featured John Peterson of Public Architecture, who had participated in a panel discussion titled “Sustainability Without Borders” at this year’s NeoCon. In this follow-up, we’ll focus on the two other participants in that panel.

Rose Tourje is the founder and president of the non-profit ANEW Foundation, whose catchphrase “doing what’s right with what’s left” sums up the organization’s sustainable mission: ANEW helps streamline the process of finding homes for used or surplus furniture, building materials, and office miscellany. By taking the cast-offs from office remodels or manufacturers’ discontinued product lines and placing them with organizations—mostly other non-profits or public agencies—that need the materials but don’t have the budget to buy everything brand-new, ANEW helps reduce landfill waste and extends the life cycle of systems furniture that many companies treat as disposable.

Rose Tourje, in a screenshot from the short documentary “ANEW: doing what’s right with what’s left.”

ANEW and Change For Balance Productions have produced a succinct documentary about the challenges of demolition waste and their efforts to stem the tide. It includes the voices of clients who have benefited from the organization’s services, but, perhaps more tellingly, we also hear from leaders in the furniture industry who see ANEW as a new model for large-scale repurposing.

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Sustainability is, by now, a well-embedded and highly visible part of public discourse. Buildings that breathe and cities that live are less science fiction than just plain science, and people are becoming more and more conscious of the impact their actions have on increasingly stressed ecosystems. But even with shifting mindsets and a host of technologies making it ever easier to build better buildings for the environment, designers still work hard to find solutions to the most fundamental design problem of all: how to design better buildings (or cities, landscapes, or products) for people.

Public Architecture’s Open Space Strategy hopes to reclaim San Francisco’s urban space for people (rather than cars), and brings together designers and the community.

Socially-conscious design is an established topic of interest for us at Metropolis, so we were especially excited to see a series of panel discussions at this year’s NeoCon that engaged with that very issue. The panels collectively raised an important question: what does social sustainability look like? Unsurprisingly, there’s no single answer, just as the concept of sustainability itself resists an easy, singular definition. Every design project exists in a web of complex relationships—cultural, geographic, legal, or otherwise—that a designer must navigate, and potential responses to those circumstances are as varied as the ambiguously-defined terms we throw around (“community-based”? “Public interest”? “Crowdsourced”?) when we’re trying to talk about working from the “bottom” up rather than from the top down.

Despite the inherent slipperiness of the subject, though, the NeoCon panels showcased some exemplary people and organizations who’ve set the bar high for social responsibility in design. In this series of blog posts, we’ll be exploring their (and others’) projects and approaches in an effort to find a working definition, messy and multivalent though it might be, of social sustainability.

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