Pharos is a comprehensive independent database of chemicals, polymers, metals, and materials.

It was originally developed by the Habitable research team to save time by consolidating data from hundreds of different sources into one place. This system is available via subscription and is used by manufacturers, retailers, designers, NGOs, government groups, and academics across many industry sectors.  

Pharos hosts hazard data for over 200,000 unique chemicals from more than 100 hazard lists. Pharos then maps these data to 25 different resulting types of human health and environmental hazards – such as reproductive toxicity or global warming potential – and assigns a hazard level (e.g high, moderate or low concern) for each endpoint. This translation and distillation of enormous amounts of complex data, to a searchable and practical set of bottom lines makes Pharos a powerful tool. Further, these data are constantly updated to ensure users get the most current information. Pharos helps companies save time finding hazard information, reducing risks by avoiding chemicals of highest concern, and leading the market with safer products. One specific way companies utilize Pharos in their chemicals management process is with RSLs. 

While 12,000 different chemicals are approved for use in the manufacture of food contact materials and articles, most of those chemicals have little to no chemical hazard data associated with them, and some are known to be toxic to humans and/or the environment. 1

Recently a global coalition of leading food service companies, environmental NGOs, and technical experts jointly developed a harmonized Food Contact Chemicals of Concern List (FCCoCL). Hosted on Pharos, FCCoCL provides users with a clear pathway to avoid the most concerning chemicals. 

The voluntary actions taken by companies to disclose and verify the absence of chemicals of concern will help them stay ahead of legislative and regulatory requirements and establish themselves as industry leaders.

Use RSLs to facilitate internal chemicals management.
Whether or not your company’s chemicals management policy is public, an RSL can reduce or eliminate restricted substances in your facilities and in your suppliers’ incoming materials. For example, the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals Manufacturing Restricted Substances list (ZDHC MRSL), available in Pharos, catalogs substances that are banned from intentional use in the apparel and footwear industries and their supply chains. By communicating these restrictions to the entire supply chain, manufacturers minimize the impact of banned hazardous chemicals on production workers, local communities, and the environment, while helping meet their corporate sustainability goals. 

Use RSLs to maximize your customers’ peace of mind.
Retailers, brands, and manufacturers have published Restricted Substances Lists (RSLs) to help their suppliers identify the top priority chemicals to remove or minimize in their products and processes. For example, Target has relied on an RSL to implement their Chemicals Policy since 2017. Their latest list, the Target Priority Chemical List, is intended to incentivize and support the design of beauty, baby care, personal care, and household cleaning products that are better for people and the planet.

RSLs are a great way to get started working towards eliminating chemicals of known concern, but they do have limitations. RSLs tell you what not to use, but they cannot tell you what chemicals to use. The best next step beyond RSLs is to prefer fully disclosed, fully assessed, safer alternatives. 

To identify safer alternatives, we recommend starting with full chemical hazard assessments, such as a GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals or those found in the ChemFORWARD shared repository of chemical hazard assessments. Hazard assessments enable informed decisions towards safer alternatives. 

Simona is a dynamic community of practitioners who help co-create solutions to accelerate the adoption of healthier building materials in affordable housing. She has presented at national conferences, lectures regularly at the University of Minnesota, and currently co-chairs the AIA Minnesota Committee on the Environment (COTE).

Simona was instrumental in the Living Building Challenge Petal Certification of MSR Design’s new downtown Minneapolis headquarters, which achieved the materials, beauty, and equity petals. The project incorporated more than 114 Red List Free materials and achieved a 28 percent reduction of its embodied carbon footprint by using salvaged materials. She also led the development of guidelines around transparency, sustainability, and health for the firm’s materials library, including training materials for staff and external sales reps.

We sat down with Simona to learn why materials have been a focus of her career and to get her perspective on the green building industry today.

Assuming that healthier materials always cost more is a common misconception that often stops healthier material initiatives from even being discussed. Here are a few things you can do to start your journey without impacting your budget.

Paints
Paint is one of the easiest categories to start with, as healthier alternatives are readily available with no cost premium. Most paints today have Low or Zero VOC content and emissions and that are free of the endocrine-disrupting chemical APEs (Alkylphenol Ethoxylates), which are also toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms. “Endocrine disrupting” is a fancy way of saying they mimic hormones and send false signals, which cause problems in humans, and are especially problematic to children whose internal systems are nascent and developing. 

Carpets
Avoid the use of carpets with stain repellents or stain treatments. PFAS is the chemical name often cited as a worst-in-class stain and water repellent chemical, and in performance testing, it often falls short of the job it is purported to do and instead, it rubs off and enters our bodies. 

Insulation
Whenever possible, avoid the use of spray foam insulation, which is reacted onsite and can expose installers and building occupants to hazardous ingredients that can cause asthma. Prefer fiberglass, formaldehyde-free mineral wood, or cellulose insulation. 

Use our InformedTM product guidance to quickly and easily find healthier products. 

Antimicrobials
Avoid building products marketed as “antimicrobial” or “containing antibacterials” or similar claims. Some products on the market today include antimicrobials that are added for the purpose of making marketing claims around a product’s potential health benefits. However, there is no evidence that these added chemicals improve human health, and ironically, they can cause harm.

Dr. Ami Zota, Associate Professor at the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health at the George Washington University (GWU) Milken Institute School of Public Health, created a platform to amplify underrepresented voices in science and environmental health. She launched her vision, Agents of Change, in 2019 with its first cohort of changemakers.

The high-achieving crew included Dr. MyDzung Chu, a first-generation Vietnamese-American, environmental epidemiologist, new mother, and postdoctoral scientist at the GWU Milken Institute School of Public Health. MyDzung is invested in understanding social determinants of health and environmental exposures within the home, workplace, and neighborhood contexts. Her current research investigates the impact of federal housing assistance on residential environmental exposures for low-income communities. 

In her Agents of Change blog, Why Housing Security is Key to Environmental Justice, MyDzung examines the intersection of housing, racism, and environmental justice, and its effects on population health. She challenges us: “It is time for the environmental health community to step up and be at the forefront of addressing housing insecurity.”

Educators are doing important work and making our homes, workplaces and communities safer to inhabit. Pharos can help you meet your goals and streamline your work. In addition to our standard online access, now there are more ways to access chemical hazard data! 

• Connect to the Pharos API to reduce manual entry and ensure you have the most current information available.
• Not able to take our API yet, but still manually managing lists of lists for your EHS, regulatory, or sustainability programs? We offer low-cost standard and custom data downloads from Pharos to power your internal chemicals management programs.

Broad Impacts of Toxic Chemicals
One way researchers quantify the impact of chemicals is to consider the broad economic impacts of chemical exposures. Evidence increasingly shows that toxic chemical exposures may be costing the USA billions of dollars and millions of IQ points. One recent study estimates that certain endocrine-disrupting chemicals cost the United States $340 billion each year. This is a staggerring 2.3% of the US gross domestic product.1 And that is for only a subset of the hazardous chemicals that surround us every day. These numbers provide important context for the larger discussion of toxic chemical use, but cannot easily be tied to daily decisions about specific materials.

Market Scale Impacts
For years, Habitable has been targeting orthophthalates in vinyl flooring as a key chemical and product category combination to be avoided. Orthophthalates can be released from products and deposited in dust which can be inhaled or ingested by residents—particularly young children who crawl on floors and often place their hands in their mouths3. By systematically reducing chemicals of concern in common products, we can all work together to continue to affect this scale of change in the marketplace and keep millions more tons of hazardous chemicals out of buildings.

Impacts on the Project Scale
Context is key for understanding the impact chemical reduction or elimination can have—a pound of one chemical may not have the same level of impact as a pound of another chemical. But, given the right context, this sort of calculation may prove useful as part of a larger story. The following examples provide context for the story of different impacts of different chemicals. 

• Small decisions, big impacts: While many manufacturers and retailers have phased out hazardous orthophthalate plasticizers, some vinyl flooring may still contain them. If we consider an example affordable housing project, avoiding orthophthalates in flooring can keep dozens of pounds of these hazardous chemicals out of a single unit (about the equivalent of 10 gallons of milk).4 For a whole building, this equates to several tons of orthophthalates that can be avoided.5 It is easy to see how this impact quickly magnifies in the context of a broader market shift.
   
• Little things matter: Alkylphenol ethoxylates (APEs) in paints are endocrine-disrupting chemicals make up less than one percent of a typical paint. In this case, by making the choice to avoid APEs, a couple of pounds of these hazardous chemicals are kept out of a single unit (about the equivalent of a quart of milk). This translates to a couple of hundred pounds kept out of an entire building.6 This quantity may seem small compared to the tons avoided in the phthalate example above, but little things matter. Small exposures to chemicals can have big impacts, particularly for developing children.7 And, since our environments can contain many hazardous chemicals, and we aren’t exposed to just a single chemical at a time, these exposures stack up in our bodies.8
• Reducing exposure everywhere: Choosing products without hazardous target chemicals keeps them out of buildings, but can also reduce exposures as these products are manufactured, installed, and disposed of or recycled. Some chemicals may have impacts that occur primarily outside of the residence where they are installed, but these impacts can still be significant. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), for example, a primary component of vinyl flooring, requires toxic processes for its production and can generate toxic pollution when it is disposed of. Manufacturing of the PVC needed to create the vinyl flooring for one building as described above can release dozens of pounds of hazardous chlorinated emissions, impacting air quality in surrounding communities.9 These fenceline communities are often low-income, and suffer from disproportionate exposure in their homes, through their work, and from local air pollution. If choosing non-vinyl flooring for a single building can help reduce potential exposure to hazardous chlorinated emissions in these fenceline communities, imagine the potential impacts of avoiding vinyl on a larger scale!

In addition to information about target chemicals to avoid, our Informed™ product guidance provides recommendations of alternative types of materials that are typically better from a health hazard perspective and includes steps to work toward the goal of full transparency of product content and full assessment of chemical hazards. This framework can help ensure that toxic chemicals and  regrettable substitutions are avoided.

Each decision you make about the materials you use, each step toward using healthier products, can have big impacts within a housing unit, a building, and in the broader environment. Collectively, these individual decisions also influence manufacturers to provide better, more transparent products for us all. Ultimately, this can reduce the hazardous chemicals not just in our buildings but also in our bodies.

After ventilating the student housing building in Minneapolis, the city’s initially “high chemical readings” dropped. According to the Minnesota Daily article, the city’s inspections show the levels are now safe. Meanwhile, one of the workers who was initially sickened by the incident was an independent contractor and therefore ineligible for workers’ compensation for the symptoms he is still experiencing months later. This and future incidents are preventable. Safer selection of materials begins with product transparency.

Market Influence

A similar policy change led by the retailer in 2015, banning phthalates from all vinyl flooring it sells, was quickly adopted by all other major retailers such as Lowes, Menards, and Lumber Liquidators. Similarly, when Lowes led the industry in banning the sale of deadly paint strippers in May, 2018, its major competitors followed suit within months

Class approach to chemicals

PFAS refers to a class of nearly 15,000 that repel liquids and resist sticking, including well-known brands such as Teflon, Gore-Tex, Stainmaster and Scotchgard. Many brands have stopped using the most well studied, “long-chain” compounds in this class, but continue to use less studied “short-chain” compounds, causing confusion for consumers. Independent scientists agree that a commitment to avoiding all PFAS is the right approach for consumers and the overall environment.

Widespread PFAS Contamination of the Environment Is a Growing Concern. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has identified over 700 sites where PFAS were detected and cited federal data suggesting that up to 110 million Americans may have PFAS in their drinking water.1 HBN’s analysis of chlorine and PVC production documented unexpectedly high use of PFAS as an alternative to mercury- and asbestos-based chlorine manufacturing technology, raising new concerns about the role of chlorine-based products and the growing concern over global PFAS exposures. The chemical industry argues that only a few of these compounds have been found unsafe, and all others should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. In 2019, 3M company launched a major public relations blitz2 to this effect, including a “PFAS Facts” website advocating that “Each PFAS compound needs to be evaluated based upon its own properties,”3 a process that would take federal regulators, at best, many decades to complete. EWG published a thorough refutation of 3M’s claims,4 and more than 250 independent scientists5 have called upon companies and regulators to stop producing and using PFAS except in the most essential applications. The Home Depot’s new carpet and rug policy, which we hope will soon be extended to other products including spray-on upholstery protection, such as 3M’s Scotchgard, follows this recommended class approach.

The Home Depot’s new policy commitment comes just two months before the release of the 2019 “Who’s Minding the Store?” Retailer Report Card, from the Mind the Store campaign, a nationwide coalition that challenges retailers to eliminate toxic chemicals and substitute safer alternatives. HBN is a coalition member and advised The Home Depot on its 2017 Chemical Strategy. The annual Report Card benchmarks retailers on their safer chemicals policies and implementation programs. The Home Depot earned a B- on the scorecard.

To learn more about PFAS and how to avoid them, watch the documentary The Devil You Know, available on all streaming services, and check out the new PFAS Central website, a project of our partners at the Green Science Policy Institute.