Healthy Materials and the Constitutional Responsibility for Health and Wellbeing

by Laura Kienlen & SERA Architects

Published in 2024

Resource

SERA’s former Sustainability Manager Beth Lavelle recently wrote an op-ed in the Portland Business Journal that has inspired some interesting conversations in the office about architects’ and designers’ responsibility to safeguard the public’s right to a healthy and safe environment.

Recent court cases (Held v. Montana, Juliana v. U.S.) have led to decisions that directly tie climate change to constitutional rights. The Held decision found that the state of Montana, “. . . is failing to meet their affirmative duty to protect Plaintiffs’ right to a clean and healthful environment, and to protect Montana’s natural resources from unreasonable depletion.” Beth’s thought-provoking question is: If the U.S. government can be found at fault for depriving the public of a clean and healthy environment, does the building sector risk similar liability?

Beth’s piece focuses on the need for greater regulation to require the use of green building strategies, and I argue that the same is true for healthy building materials. When designers, builders, and developers choose toxic materials, they risk liability for the harm they cause to the users of their spaces as well as those involved along the supply chain.

As architects and designers, we bear a profound responsibility to shape the world around us, not just aesthetically, but also ethically and responsibly. Our designs don’t exist in isolation; they interact intimately with the lives of individuals, communities, and the environment. In this regard, the materials we specify play a pivotal role in shaping the health and safety of the spaces we create.

The Challenge: Competing Priorities and the Bottom Line

Cost & Performance:
From a material cost point of view, healthier materials can often be comparable to the price points of more toxic materials. However, the time and labor hours spent researching, validating, and tracking healthier material selections and certifications can significantly add to total project costs, and this is often a barrier to designers’ selection process. The reality is, it takes less time to select finishes when we’re only focused on performance and aesthetics, without the added layer of validating and certifying material health properties too.

There’s little motivation for clients to choose healthy materials:
Clients are faced with a variety of pressures and priorities, like staying within budget and getting the project done on schedule. They also might assume that the government is regulating and eliminating toxic products from the market – which is not the case. Without awareness and the drive from company values, regulatory requirements, or consumer demand, there may be little motivation for clients to choose healthier materials, especially in any case where there is a cost premium. As much as designers can advocate for healthier materials on our projects, we are often limited by project priorities and available project fee hours.

Navigating the complexities of certifications–information overload:
With all of the project responsibilities designers must juggle, and a vast landscape of material certifications with different levels of rigor and limited considerations beyond the use phase, it can be overwhelming and burdensome to understand and navigate healthier material product selection. After all, we are not scientists!

Useful Options and Better Strategies

The good news is, we are beginning to see more resources to help designers make healthier product decisions, regardless of client priorities and certification goals. One of SERA’s go-to resources is Habitable’s Informed Product Guidance. The intuitive red-to-green color ranking compiles decades of research to summarize key health impacts and considerations across the life-cycle of common building materials.

The first step? Avoid selecting materials in the red categories, and opt for yellow or green instead. Want to learn more? Expand the drop-down menus to read about the health impacts of that material type. Importantly, this tool does not suggest specific manufacturers or products. Instead, it provides guidance about types of materials, making it easier for designers to prioritize what to look for when generating finish palettes and selecting specific products. Identifying safer building product types means that designers don’t have to do as much research or memorize long lists of materials. It’s like shopping the perimeter at grocery stores, where the fruits, vegetables, and other fresh goods are usually laid out. The center aisles are where all the candy, super-processed snacks, and other less natural products lurk–if you stay out of that area, you can be confident that you’ll be eating relatively healthful foods, even without knowing the latest updates on ingredients or additives. (The almonds in that candy bar may be certified organic, but we all know it’s not a very healthy option, right?). Habitable’s Informed Product Guidance can help get you to the right aisles—and know that you’ll be specifying products that are generally safer for building occupants, workers, and communities.

Considerations from the science side: looking at materials through the life-cycle lens

For example, it’s common for housing developers to opt for Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT) due to its durability, easy installation, and low first cost. However, we can see by looking at the Informed Product Guidance that LVT is in the red category. Phthalates, chemicals known to disrupt the hormonal system, were once commonly found in LVT. While in recent years we’ve seen more and more phthalate-free LVT products become available, even “better” vinyl is still not a preferred material! This is because of the toxic processes required to make polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and the toxic pollution created when it’s disposed of. And let’s not forget, vinyl is a form of plastic derived from fossil fuels, so its use continues our reliance on the polluting fossil fuel industry at a time when we are electrifying our buildings to decrease fossil fuel use.

What does that all really mean? Not only can building products have negative health impacts on the daily occupants of a space, they often impact installers, factory workers handling the material production, and the communities living near those processes. And unfortunately in the case of housing, renters are likely unaware of any of this when selecting a place to live. Which brings us back to the dilemma for designers: is it really ethical to specify a material when we know its negative health impacts? And if we make the decision to take care in our specifications, how can we encourage our clients to approve healthier alternatives?

The Long-Term Solution: Increased Demand and Regulation

From our perspective, it remains essential for designers and building professionals to make a commitment to disrupt the status quo, prioritize implementing better product selections on our projects, and have meaningful conversations with clients about the importance of healthier and non-plastic materials. In other words, continue to make noise! At the same time, what’s really going to make a change in the industry is an increase in demand for healthier products.

One avenue for increased demand can come from consumers. Apartment dwellers, home owners, office workers, hotel guests, and restaurant-goers (and so on!) have the right to know whether a material or product contains toxic substances or uses them in manufacturing. More often than not, consumers are in the dark about the toxics found in building products due to lack of visibility and awareness. Much like nutrition labels found on food products, it’s reasonable to expect that building materials and finishes in the public marketplace could include clear labels like hazard pictograms or ingredients lists. At a minimum, this may help consumers start to have some visibility into the harmful chemicals used in the built environment. Imagine a world where healthy buildings, spaces, and materials are desired and actively sought-out by the general public! That just might be enough incentive to drive market change.

While visibility and awareness may increase some demand for healthier materials, the burden of change is broader than that. Arguably, the biggest agent of change will come from government regulation to reduce harmful substances used in consumer products in the first place. For example in the EU, REACH Regulation aims to protect health and the environment against harmful chemicals. And the Classification, Labeling and Packaging (CLP) Regulation ensures hazards posed by chemicals are clearly communicated when placed on the market, enabling consumers to make informed decisions when purchasing or using products. It is critical that the U.S. government begins to take responsibility for policies and regulation that better protect citizens and the environment, and boost innovation for safe and sustainable chemicals.

Looking forward, we envision a world where healthier materials will be actively sought out by consumers, more strictly regulated at the government level, and ultimately become the baseline standard for all construction and building materials and finishes. For now, we must continue to advocate for change, educate ourselves (using tools like Habitable’s Informed Product Guidance to step up from red-ranked products!), and intentionally make healthier product selections on our projects. This responsibility isn’t just a passing concern; it’s a duty we owe to ourselves, to each other, and to future generations.