ASHRAE Journal - October 2020 - 49

COLUMN ENGINEER'S NOTEBOOK

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Certiﬁcation/Declaration Count

Recently, I received this quesFIGURE 1 Building industry disclosure certification counts as of August 2020. Updated from Yang and Tepfer,
Figure 3, Page 17.8
tion from an ASHRAE colleague
3,000
in manufacturing: "What product
HPD
Declare
C2C
certiﬁcations (EPD, HPD, DECLARE,
Living Product Challenge, etc.) are
2,500
being asked for?"
I suspect many readers are unfa2,000
miliar with these terms. I say this
with some conﬁdence because
1,500
earlier this year, some of my colleagues did a six-month research
1,000
project to email and call more
than 40 mechanical and plumb500
ing manufacturer's representatives
to access information from their
0
respective equipment manufacturers, explaining that we were
endeavoring to vet the health and
sustainability aspects of products in
our standard speciﬁcations.
Thirteen manufacturers never
responded, and 26 had no content even after six months
While there are a couple of large international comof discussion. Only three provided product certiﬁcapanies that have shown early development of environtions, and two others were familiar with the "Red List" of mental product declarations (EPDs),9 our industry at
large has much room for progress on proof of use of
chemicals to be avoided.6,7
Figure 1 shows a count of publicly available matehealthier materials. The current practice is to obtain
rial health disclosures across all the sections of the
third-party veriﬁcation under recognized standards
Construction Speciﬁcations Institute's classiﬁcation
such as ISO 14025:2006, Environmental Labels and
system. They are from the databases of the three most
Declarations-Type III Environmental Declarations-
popular standards-Declare, Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C)
Principles and Procedures).
and the Health Product Declaration. This reveals that
Lessons Learned from Architects
the MEP trades are very low in participation compared
In the architectural community, there has been activity
to other building trades.
over the past 15 years to integrate healthy building mateThe conversations with the manufacturers revealed
rial requirements into sustainability rating systems and
that the main barriers to healthy materials certiﬁcation
to build associated databases to ﬁnd them (Figure 2). Key
were:
* Limited knowledge of green building rating systems steps along the way included:
* Philosophical grounding, creation of the Health
other than LEED;
Product Declaration standard and material health
* Lack of published manufacturers' information
chemical research by McDonough Braungart Design
regarding materials;
* International companies with supply chains lacking Chemistry (MBDC), which founded the Cradle to Cradle
Production Innovation Institute (tinyurl.com/yxr6zx5o);
transparency;
* Creation of the Living Building Challenge
* Minimal regulation from governmental agencies; and
* Little to no current ﬁnancial incentive in the market Materials Petal's "Red List" of toxic materials
(tinyurl.com/z5xctad);
to adopt any healthy material standard or improve
* The American Institute of Architects' commitment to
transparency above the mandatory manufacturer's
healthier indoor environments, including clarity on prosafety data sheet.
O CTO B E R 2020

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ASHRAE JOURNAL

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ASHRAE Journal - October 2020

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