Redefining What Makes a Building Product Green

It's easy to get lost in a sea of greenwash. Our updated GreenSpec criteria provide clear direction on what makes a product green.

BuildingGreen has been defining what makes a product green since the start of the GreenSpec directory in 1998--and we're repeatedly surprised by how far and wide our list of green attributes travels. The industry is not static, though, and it is our aim to continue providing a compass that points from today's best practices to truly sustainable materials management.

This month's EBN feature article on what makes a product green lays out our "green attributes" for 2012--a set of broad criteria and definitions, knit together with life-cycle thinking, that we use to evaluate products for listing in GreenSpec. Key changes from our last update in 2006 show both how far we have come and how much further we have left to go in achieving the kind of materials management that would support a sustainable society.

Biobased materials aren't green just because they're biobased.

It's time to raise the level of scrutiny on all of them--not just wood. We've provided extensive coverage over the years on the debate over wood certifications, and we've also helped guide designers to the latest in rapidly renewable materials--but that's not enough. While biobased materials hold the promise of true sustainability and regeneration of ecosystems instead of damage to them, biobased materials today can be at least as problematic as any other material.

In the past, we've provided provisional approval to polymers with biobased content and other innovations that we see as stepping stones toward a sustainable materials system based on renewables, but we can't let the industry stop with these half-steps. Alone, biobased matierals can make things worse instead of better.

Green is about the behavior of whole industries.

Green isn't just about the product or even the life cycle of the product. It's about the behavior of whole industries. Preferentially purchasing from responsible companies increases the impact of green procurement. By focusing on Information Transparency and applauding companies who provide deeper data, we'll see increasingly marked improvements in the information available as companies get the hint that obfuscation and partial truth is no longer an option.  By focusing on Responsible Corporate Practices, we make it clear that it's no longer possible for a manufacturer simply to create one product for a niche "green" market while continuing business as usual with other product lines.

It's time to consider resiliency and adaptation, not just emissions reductions.

I still think "Global Weirding" is the best description yet for what climate change will bring--and already is bringing through increased and increasingly dramatic storms and weather anomalies. Alex Wilson's blog series on Resilient Design highlights how to address these issues in buildings, but GreenSpec is also stepping up to the task of identifying products that uniquely contribute to resiliency. (Also watch for Alex's special feature article on resilience in March.)

Those familiar with our Green Attributes will find many other changes. We hope the changes will make it easier to understand and use these guidelines in the process of defining for yourself what makes a product green in the context of your projects. It won't stop here. With "What Makes a Product Green" we're signaling direction. The next step is to work with you on heading down that path. As 2012 progresses, you'll see us diving deeper into the key issues outlined above.

Image: Bensonwood

Posted by Jennifer Atlee on February 8, 2012

Comments

RIck Duncan
Wed, 2012-02-08 09:29
Let me first begin by saying that improving the environmental impacts, measured by attributes such as durability, recycled/renewable content and the like are noble goals and step in the right direction for the evolution of new building products and construction practices. While these single-attribute measures are easy to measure and understand, and have a certain emotional appeal, they may or may not accurately represent the true impacts they have on the environment. For example, there are many environmental impacts that are often ignored when recycled materials are used in place of virgin materials. Collection, transport and additional processing of recycled products can have a negative impact on the environment; in few cases, a more negative impact than the virgin materials they replace. Design professionals must move towards a focus on scientifically-based measures instead of single-attributes when selecting environmentally friendly building products. There is a systematic and scientifically-based means to do this through an ISO-compliant Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCAs provide a fair, transparent and credible process to evaluate measureable environmental impacts for a defined functional unit of a product from cradle to end-of-life. Environmental impacts from LCAs typically include: • global warming potential (equivalent CO2) • ozone depletion potential (equivalent CFC-11) • photochemical ozone creation potential (O3 or SMOG generation) • acidification (hydrogen ion release) • eutrophication (nitrogen and phosphorus release) • eco-toxicity (carcinogenic, mutagenic and reproductive effects) • renewable and non-renewable energy consumption (MJ) Environmental impacts are accounted for from ALL material flows and processes needed to make the product. For a cradle to end-of-life LCA, material flows and processes include raw material extraction, material processing, manufacturing, transportation, installation, use and disposal. The ISO-based LCA process requires third-party evaluation of all work done to develop these numbers. This independent evaluation assures that the process is transparent and the results are accurate and credible. When LCAs are completed on different products using the same functional unit and scope (e.g., cradle to end-of-life), only then can design professionals make rational, data-driven product selections. When it comes to selecting building products and construction practices with low environmental impacts, design professionals need to move away from single-attribute measures, and ask material producers to provide ISO-compliant LCA reports, Life-Cycle Inventory (LCI) data and Environmental Product Declarations. Use these ‘bottom-line’ results to compare materials. Only then can designers make clear and rational product and process decisions for their projects. Richard Duncan, Ph.D., P.E. Technical Director Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance
Robert Riversong
Wed, 2012-02-08 08:14
It's heartening to see the evolution of the concept of "green" in the design and building realms, but we still labor under a very narrow understaning of a term which, in its fullness, represents the core principle of the living earth, the alchemical transmutation of sunlight into the Web of Life. To touch on the expansiveness and wholeness of the notion of "green", I gave a presentation at a Yestermorrow Design/Build School public forum on "What is Green" in 2008. It is available at my blog: http://riversong.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/what-does-green-really-mean/
Robert Riversong
Wed, 2012-02-08 10:10
It's curious that the Technical Director of the Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance, an industry which is the antithesis of green, would stress "scientifically-based" metrics such as LCA, when the complexity of the LCA model and the difficulty in determining reliable inputs, developing a credible analysis model, and extrapolating local data to a global product would render it less than reliable in many instances. In the 2000 report "Quality Assessment for LCA" by Nico W. van den Berg, Gjalt Huppes, Erwin W. Lindeijer, Bernhard L. van der Ven, and M. Nicoline Wrisberg from three Dutch institutes involved with LCA: "LCA for decision support lacks a systematic quality assessment to guide makers, peer reviewers and users of LCA studies. Trust is the main basis for acceptance, which usually is not present in adversary situations. Without systematic quality assessment LCA may easily degrade into a mere PR instrument." From the report: Shortcomings and approximations of the LCA model • Being a simplified model, LCA yields result that differ in several respects from "what will really happen", but how they differ is too difficult to predict and evaluate. • The inventory model is a generally comparatively static model, for example, built from a number of processes each described in terms of linear input-output relations, describing a sort of steady state. In reality, however, we know there are dynamic non-linearities. • Actual versus potential effects: the environmental models used in LCA describe potential environmental effects of emissions. • LCA presumes linearity of production scale and of environmental effects related to the functional unit. • LCA generally treats local and global information and effects in the same way, abstracting mainly from local aspects.
Rick Duncan
Wed, 2012-02-08 10:46
Mr. Birdsong - The report you mentioned was written in 2000, and undoubtedly references LCA work that was done in the late 20th century. We are now more than a dozen years into the 21st century. A lot of progress has been made to improve the quality of LCA reports...namely the involvement of the International Standards Organization (ISO) since 2006. Relevant (ISO) LCA Documents 1. ISO 14040: Environmental Management—Life Cycle Assessment—Principles and Framework, Second Edition; International Organisation for Standardisation, 2006. 2. ISO 14044: Environmental Management—Life Cycle Assessment—Requirements and Guidelines, First Edition; International Organisation for Standardisation, 2006.
Robert Riversong
Wed, 2012-02-08 14:29
Rick Duncan, I realized that the study I quoted might be considered a bit out of date (even if the conclusion is still valid). For a PhD who believes in the reliability of "objective" science-based metrics, you might have gotten my name correct and calculated the era accurately - we are not " more than a dozen years into the 21st century", but 11 years and one month (the century began 1/1/2001). From Wikipedia (based on recent research, including material from BuildingGreen.com, 2010): "Life cycle assessment is a powerful tool for analyzing commensurable aspects of quantifiable systems. Not every factor, however, can be reduced to a number and inserted into a model. Rigid system boundaries make accounting for changes in the system difficult…The accuracy and availability of data can also contribute to inaccuracy. For instance, data from generic processes may be based on averages, unrepresentative sampling, or outdated results. Additionally, social implications of products are generally lacking in LCAs… because of aspects like differing system boundaries, different statistical information, different product uses, etc., these studies can easily be swayed in favor of one product or process over another in one study and the opposite in another study based on varying parameters and different available data. There are guidelines to help reduce such conflicts in results but the method still provides a lot of room for the researcher to decide what is important, how the product is typically manufactured, and how it is typically used." From Treatment Of Uncertainties In Life Cycle Assessment, Jack W. Baker, Michael D. Lepech, Stanford University (2009): "A life cycle assessment includes a number of phases: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. Each of these phases has significant associated uncertainties. Decisions made without regard to these uncertainties may be flawed."
Jennifer Atlee
Wed, 2012-02-08 13:10
Richard and Robert, We at BuildingGreen have long been advocates of considering the full lifecycle of a product when seeking out preferable alternatives. In our 2000 version of the What Makes a Product Green article we said "The Holy Grail of the green building movement would be a database in which the life-cycle environmental impacts of different materials were fully quantified and the impacts weighted so that a designer could easily see which material was better from an environmental standpoint." I still think that'd be great, but In 2012, we're still not there. For one, there is a continued lack of availability and accessibility of robust comparable data. Also, there are indeed significant critiques of LCA that point to areas of concern the methodology does not adequately capture (such as site-specific impacts and human health)--and while improvements have certainly been made, many of these critiques continue to have validity. At the same time, formal LCA is an important tool that we hope to see used and improved, and we also hope that Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) will help to make the real insights from LCA more accessible to designers (all of which we discussed in our last EBN feature on Product Transparency). Given all of this, we consider it our responsibility to provide a set of guidelines to help designers and others in the industry to use the information they have available to make the best possible decisions today. Richard, you'll note that we include in the article exactly the concerns you discuss when talking about recycled content: "In certain situations, from a life-cycle perspective, recycling has downsides. For example, energy consumption or pollution may be a concern with some collection programs or recycling processes. Also, closed-loop recycling is generally preferable to downcycling, in which a lower-grade material is produced. As more complete life-cycle information on recycled materials—and the process of recycling—becomes available, we intend to scrutinize recycled products more carefully." At this point we continue to include recycled content as a discrete attribute, because in a lot of cases it's a good indicator of lower environmental impact, given lack of better data. Again, we always encourage decisionmakers to dig deeper and take a full life cycle perspective. In the GreenSpec directory we focus down from these general green attributes to the key life cycle concerns for each product category, using the best information we can find.
Ramakrishna Venkatasamy
Thu, 2012-02-09 19:30
I hardly think any building can do without wood or other bio-based materials. There is still the issue of chemically treated wood that may leach out toxic chemicals, and the problem with VOCs.
Paula Melton
Fri, 2012-02-10 00:56
Ramakrishna, I don't think anyone's suggesting that we do without any biobased materials. Right now many people give biobased materials a pass, assuming they're greener. The hope is to increase scrutiny on all materials to the level of scrutiny we have with wood products--including "rapidly renewable" materials like corn-based polymers. Growing and processing corn is a petroleum-intensive process, so by the time you're done you might have burned more oil than you would have used by choosing a straight petroleum product. There are also petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers involved that cause serious problems.
Rick Duncan
Sat, 2012-02-11 04:41
Jennifer, I just received the January 2012 EBN yesterday and your feature article written with Paula Melton about product transparency is phenomenal. I would definately agree that LCA is not a complete solution, but like the article mentions it does provide a better means that single-attibute evaluations for both industry to improve the environmental impacts of their products and processes, and fordecision-makers to clearly evaluate product alternatives. Thank you for leading me to this article. Regards, Rick Duncan

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About the Authors

Alex Wilson is founder and executive editor of BuildingGreen, Inc., and coeditor of GreenSpec. For more than 30 years, Alex has been the most trusted voice on energy efficiency and environmentally responsible design and construction. Since launching Environmental Building News (EBN) in 1992, he’s built a reputation, resources, and staff to serve the companies for whom sustainable design is a core value. 

 

Brent Ehrlich is BuildingGreen’s products editor, conducts research and writes product and category insights for the company’s GreenSpec product directory. He also contributes product reviews and feature articles for Environmental Building News, and is a contributing editor to McGraw-Hill’s GreenSource magazine.

 

Jennifer Atlee is research director at BuildingGreen, responsible for guiding the in-depth independent research that is the hallmark of all BuildingGreen resources. With her broad knowledge in sustainability, analytical acumen, and passion for improving the standards used to assess the sustainability of products, processes, and organizations, Jennifer brings strong direction to the research process behind GreenSpec’s product-screening decisions, and technical rigor to BuildingGreen’s custom research projects.

 

Tristan Roberts is Editorial Director at BuildingGreen, Inc., a position that requires broad knowledge about sustainable design, deep understanding of products, and mastery of all things LEED. Tristan Roberts brings that to Environmental Building News, GreenSpec, and LEEDuser, a plug-in tool supported by the U.S. Green Building Council to provide credit-by-credit advice for LEED projects.

 

Peter Yost brings more than 25 years' experience in building, researching, teaching, writing, and consulting on high-performance homes to his role as director of residential services for BuildingGreen. He has been called upon to provide his building-science expertise to the nation’s leading homebuilding programs, including NAHB’s Green Building Standard, USGBC's LEED for Homes, EPA’s WaterSense, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Building America.

 

Paula Melton, BuildingGreen’s managing editor, brings a dynamic style, critical mind, and sharp wit to the many feature articles, blog posts, and product reviews she writes for GreenSpec, BuildingGreen.com, Environmental Building News, and other BuildingGreen-supported websites.

 

Nadav Malin is president of BuildingGreen, where he oversees the company’s industry-leading information and community-building resources and consulting services. He also convenes and facilitates gatherings of industry leaders, and lends his technical expertise and vision to GreenSource magazine. Nadav was the founding chair of the Materials & Resources Technical Advisory Group for LEED.

 

 

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