Product Guidance

Easily choose healthier
building products.

Using Habitable’s Informed™ approach, you can identify worst-in-class building materials and step up from red-ranked products to replace them with healthier options.

Introducing Informed™

Informed™’s red-to-green guidance ranks building product types from worst to best in class, exposing life cycle impacts on human and planetary health.

Based on Habitable’s decades of independent, comprehensive research into the chemical hazards of building materials, Informed™ allows built environment professionals to quickly and easily evaluate the material health of common building products and select safer alternatives while saving time, money, and errors.

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Habitable researchers are continuously adding new product types and categories to our guidance, prioritizing those expected to have the biggest impact on health.

Educate

Informed™ offers comprehensive product guidance using a red-to-green ranking, drawing on decades of in-depth research to simplify your decision-making. This helps you select healthier materials, from avoiding most harmful plastics to finding the safest options, based on the full life cycle impacts of products on human health, the environment, and environmental justice, from as early as the concept phase of a project, regardless of the building typology.

Activate

Informed™ benchmarking and assessment tools empower project teams to assess the material health of your building products. Identify healthier materials by eliminating products ranked red while prioritizing safer yellow and green alternatives. Share your findings with clients, colleagues, and certification programs.

Moving the needle on planetary health.

The size and scale of the built environment is so significant that steps taken within this one sector will have an outsized impact on planetary health.

Drag each card to reveal facts about the built environment.

The global building stock is expected to double by 2060.

Selecting safer, healthier building products at scale will improve planetary health.

2 million tons of carpet is discarded every year in the US.

1.2 million tons of plastic landfilled or burned.

This is roughly equivalent to all the plastic straws, bags, and water bottles disposed in the US annually.

How the real estate industry can begin working toward a healthier future.

The results, based on data for Minnesota affordable housing, are consistent with products used in other building types and geographic regions.

The report highlights examples of leaders within and beyond Minnesota’s built environment who are already taking action toward safer material choices.

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Optimize for embodied carbon and health.

Built environment leaders are optimizing for decarbonization and detoxification–you don’t have to choose.

We know it’s possible to advance climate goals by selecting products that are low-carbon and minimize the harmful chemicals that impact human health.

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Affordable housing leads the way.

The affordable housing sector is leveraging Informed™ to empower healthier product selection, avoiding worst-in-class product types that put residents and workers across the supply chain at risk.

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Knowledge is power!

Discover how Informed™ can streamline your workflow by using science-backed guidance to quickly identify building product types with chemicals of concern.