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Featuring Charley Stevenson, LFA, LEED AP Charley Stevenson, Principal, Integrated Eco Strategy (IES), is a sustainability consultant and green building entrepreneur with a particular focus on helping others understand and implement their healthier materials goals. IES is a pioneer in assisting project teams in creating Full Living buildings, specializing in the Living Building Challenge Materials Petal. Since 2010, Charley’s North Adams, MA, company has managed the green aspects of projects from 1,000 to 500,000 square feet, including the Williams College Environmental Center, Hampshire College’s R.W. Kern Center, Hitchcock Center for the Environment and Yale Divinity School campus. To facilitate materials compliance, IES created Red2Green (R2G), a comprehensive platform for building materials evaluation, selection and management. R2G is available to project teams by subscription and currently in use nationwide. The advancement of building materials has allowed professionals to achieve new heights when designing and constructing high-performance buildings. But, the topic of building materials is not discussed enough, and more consumers are asking important questions. How do we know where these materials come from? What effects do they have on human health and the environment? How are standards for responsible building materials being enforced? The list continues… This two-part episode features an interview with Charley Stevenson, a sustainability consultant and green building entrepreneur who has devoted his career to helping others understand and implement healthier materials goals. The discussion begins with a look at the Living Building Challenge, a program that pays particular attention to healthy building materials, and continues with a review of some of the resources that are intended to help consumers learn more about materials and their make-up. Episode Information & Resources Living Building Challenge Materials Petal (includes the “Red List”) Materially Better / Red to Green List Health Project Declaration Collaborative Integrated Eco Strategy We Want to Hear From You! Send your feedback and questions to podcast@swinter.com About Buildings and Beyond Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health. Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com. Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello Episode Transcript Kelly: (00:06)Welcome to buildings and beyond. Robb: (00:09)a podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment. Kelly: (00:13)by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health. Robb: (00:18)I’m Robb Aldrich. Kelly: (00:19)and I’m Kelly Westby. Robb: (00:22)This episode is part two of my interview with Charley Stevenson from integrated ECO strategy. And we continue our conversation about sustainable materials and healthy materials. We got into a little more detail about specific building products and approaches to selecting those products and also prioritizing what systems to look at first, which has a bigger impact. So here’s part two of my chat with Charley Stevenson. Robb: (00:54)People that are not ready to, as you said, dive into LBC. What are some of the lightest lists? What are some of the lowest hanging fruit to really get the most bang for their buck or their time and their effort to get more sustainable materials into their projects? Charley: (01:12)I have two thoughts in mind. If my practice had a mascot, it would be a ratchet. And the notion is you do a little bit of work and you get a click and then it’s clicked. You’ve, you’ve, you’ve made a change and it’s clicked. And then when you’re ready, you can do a little bit more work and get another click. And sometimes it’s really hard to get a click. Sometimes you gets some really easy clicks. But you know, that approach is, is half half of the answer here too, to think about places where in your practice, whatever it may be, you use the same product or product type again and again. And again, I don’t know of a building that doesn’t have drywall. So Rather than think of this as a problem that needs to be solved all at once, we can just say, let’s make sure we’re using drywall we feel good about because we always use it and we often use a lot of it. So we’ve reduced the hundreds of products that we’re worried about to that single one. And then we ask the question, well, what’s the right drywall to use? And if we can figure that out for a single family residence and we can figure that out for a commercial retrofit, chances are we’ve covered 90% of the market. And then anybody who has that answer, any design team that’s incorporated that and developed confidence in whatever that product may be, can simply make that their standard or could make three good walls, their standard and exclude from future work products about which they don’t know as much. Then it’s onto the next the next segment. What are, what are the concerns with drywall? Well, a reason to focus on drywall and I’m going to get to your answer in just a second, Is that we use a lot of it. So you know, if you were to prioritize where changes in a material Palette should take place. I think about what arrives by train car, what arrives by, by tractor trailer, what arrives in small cartons in the back of a pickup truck. So, you know, drywall is not coming in the back of the pickup truck by and large. So there’s a lot of it when you’re in a building, it has it been, presents a lot of surface area to occupants. So if it’s good, it could be really good and if it’s bad it could be really bad. So sort of starting with the inside skin that is presented to occupants in working out you know, deeper into wall assemblies as is, is one approach. Thinking about volumes you procured is another way to prioritize. And then, you know, back to thinking about mastics, wet applied products are different because the curing happens in the space. So whatever, whatever solvents or whatever chemical reaction makes it cure that’s happening live in the space that you, you care about. So to the specific question, there are excellent dry walls and many commodity dry walls are, are fully disclosed, are tested for offgassing and pass with flying colors. So, you know, you can, you can go to the major manufacturers, USG, national gypsum, certainteed, and you can ask and receive a red list, free or Red List compliant drywall. Excellent. paints are another good example. You know, it, it, first of all, there’s often a lot of them in a project and they’re wet applied. So what they have for chemical activity can be significant. Charley: (05:45)It’s nice that paints had been the subject of LEED scrutiny for a couple of decades. So it’s a pretty mature market, at least as far as volatile organic compounds are concerned. You can add the question of whether it’s red list free. So I think to a major manufacturer that we all know, and you know, it’s been prevalent in the, in the industry for, for decades, if not a century. You know, eight years ago a colleague of mine call to ask what was in their paint and he kinda got a laugh back from that manufacturer to say, you know, that’s our, that’s our secret recipe. There’s no way we’re telling you what’s in that paint. You know, from, from his perspective, that made perfect sense. Now have a declare label for not one, but many products which means that over time, there’s been comfort in disclosing and there’s a recognition on their part that they gained value by revealing their chemical constituents. So the declare label, for first steps is a very effective way for project teams to identify places where there are simply good answers to the question, What product should I use? So the declared product database is it’s a prescreened list of products that the screenings they actually done by the international living future institute. So products earn labels and then you can search for them and simply see which, which products are preapproved for use on an LPC project. And there’s an awful lot within division nine. So if you’re looking for interior finishes, carpet, paint, floor finishes, ceilings, you can, I won’t say entirely, but you’re, it’s getting close to the point where you could simply pick products that pass muster just by looking for them in a, in a pre-published list. Robb: (08:07)Nice. That that has struck me as well, that there’s much more, I guess, awareness of a healthy finishes. I think it may be because you said it’s, you know, many of them are white applied in space and that’s a big deal. But it’s also, you know, homeowners going out to buy stuff for their home and really wanting to kind of, you know, making much more personal decisions. I wonder how much that drives the manufacturer in that direction. Charley: (08:43)I think that’s a lot. I think the fact that interiors have been the subject of LEED credits for 20 years has driven that a lot. So it’s a mature market. when I think about the reason to focus on material health or the health impacts of materials, it’s a nested set of concerns. So at the core is just that issue, you know, what impact will these material decisions have on occupant in building user health? So that’s a very natural place, you know, as you speak of a homeowner please don’t let me renovate my child’s room to the detriment of my child’s health. If we go out one layer, we asked the question of installer health. So you know, you know, here’s a place it makes sense that trades people would be concerned and you know, they’re the ones who are working with these materials in the building at that period of, of maximum chemical activity. So that’s the next layer. shouldn’t we ask that the question? What products can I select for installation that won’t have a negative impact on those people I’m hiring to install? The next layer is the manufacturing process. So an example here is neoprene. You know, I have, it’s not here at my desk, but before I got into this, I had a toddler and she wanted a colorful lunchbox and it happened to be native made of Neoprene, which has all sorts of fantastic properties and she could spill in it and I could wash it out and it would dry and it was good to go. It is annert, I wouldn’t mind her eating spilled apple sauce out of it. But I’m awfully glad I don’t live near or work in a neoprene factory. Charley: (10:52)So it turns out that the production of neoprene has a terrible localized impact. It’s not healthy. You know, the act of producing Neoprene produces some pernicious, in fact, immortal, pernicious chemicals. So those impacts are felt by the workers in those factories. They’re felt by fenceline communities. And then once, once out in the wild those, those chemicals persist. So it’s not the case that we exclude neoprene from projects because it’s harmful in the building, but there’s no way to have made neoprene in a responsible way. So it makes sense in an, you know, with that lens to avoid consumption of neoprene because necessarily that meant production of neoprene, which meant harm. Robb: (11:48)I was not aware of that I’m going to have to rethink some duct liners and installation. Charley: (11:58)Well in this goes back to, you know, here I am, you’re asking how to do this simply.And I’m not making it simple, but you know, so that’s maybe a you know, a 200 or 300 level question, but, you know, it goes back to this idea of defining what success looks like and once in my world, once I’ve seen that question of how do I keep occupants healthy is a, can actually be optimized, but it may be optimized at the expense of other people or other planetary systems. So, so this iterative process has us expand our scope of concern to the point where we’re asking how do we minimize harm across the entire system? Not just for the building end users. And, and that goes to you know, it goes to volume as well. There’s not that much neoprene that goes into a typical building but there’s an awful lot of paint. Charley: (13:03)So if resources are limited as they always are, you know, picking those areas where you can have the most impact or flip that around have the least impact with the least amount of work. That’s to say bring the most benefit with the least amount of work, you can get a few clicks on the ratchet there. And then you’re thinking about little wins. So if you can think of where there’s neoprene in a vibration isolation hanger if everybody that specifies that asks their typical manufacturers, whether it’s available with an EPDM gaskets, so sort of the you know, benign rubber gasket instead, you know, neoprene is lovely because it’s resistant to absolutely everything. If you’re not exposing those gaskets to oils, an EPDM gasket would have a comparable surface life. So sometimes the one size fits all solution is very harmful. And if, if you could identify within your practice where a different gasket type is, does not risk exposure to chemicals, that would cause it to degrade, then perfect. That, that, that one inquiry, that one substitution, you know, ripples through a pretty wide swath of materials procurement and you don’t have to ask the question again. Speaker 2: (14:34)Yeah. So I definitely understand the point about volume. So drywall and paint and flooring, roofing, just the sheer mass, there’s so much of it and that’s a reasonable place to start. Are there some kind of pernicious elements that people don’t know too much about, but they’re relatively easy to avoid or, or choose better, make better choices? Charley: (15:14)So I would say often we can achieve results through deletion of products or expectations. So examples of that would be antimicrobial finishes or stain resistant finishes. Or flame retardants. Robb: (15:36)So flame retardants is, you know, fire alarms, as you said, was good. Flame retardants also sound pretty good. Charley: (15:46)So that’s they do until you find out where they are and why they’re there. So flame retardants, if you have an upholstered piece of furniture, chances are it has several pounds of known carcinogens soaked into the foam. And you know, the idea is we don’t want this phone to catch on fire in. I think in everybody’s experience before the foam can catch on fire, the fabric has to catch on fire cause you can’t, you can’t get the F can’t get the flame through the fabric without getting through the fabric. So you know, here’s a case where the history is that the notion, you know, the history of flame retardants is people falling asleep on couches with lit cigarettes. And so we want the fabric not to catch fire and then we want the foam not to catch fire or rather it’s not a flame preventative, It’s a flame retardant. We want it to burn slowly enough that there’s time to get out of the building, there’s time for the alarm to get off and there’s time to get out of the building. So interestingly, those flame retardants don’t prevent fire. They just slow it. But they do it in an awfully smoky, billowy, black toxic kind of way. Robb: (17:30)So it’s to the, so it’s toxic before it burns and it’s even more toxic when it burns. Charley: (17:37)Right. And if we just had something like a wool or you know, a, a natural fiber, you know, flame retardant upholstery over it, we don’t have to worry about if we can slow the flame getting to the foam, we don’t need to slow the flame in the foam. Charley: (18:01)Now this is, this has been a terrible nontechnical way of describing it, but its an example of a place where in many jurisdictions, the, the flame retardants aren’t actually required. And when you look at what those flame retardants provide, it’s marginal safety, even in a fire, at the expense of known health har…
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