Do No Harm

Living Building Challenge

I think many of us thought if interior products were Greenguard certified, made by manufacturers who had Leed points all worked out and followed good practices, then everyone was doing his/her part in making the planet healthy. Not so fast!

There is a new way of thinking, that goes beyond the idea that we are using certain chemicals because there are no alternatives. The shift is: create a list of things that are so bad we cannot coexist. Anything that pollutes the environment, bio-accumulates up the food chain until it reaches toxic concentrations, and any chemicals that harms construction and factory workers, put it on a list and stop specifying anything that contains those chemicals. It might be hard to find alternates, but stopping today will FORCE manufacturers to develop alternates.

It is a brave, necessary approach to the crisis. But it needs early adopters who are big enough to make people take notice. And Google and the State of California step up to bat: Google, who reached its 100% renewable enegry target in 2018, Google who is worth over US$100 billion, yeah, that Google. State of California with a population of 40 million, and an annual GDP of US$3 trillion - between Google and the State of California that is a lot of power. And it has many other states and companies thinking, maybe they should be banning anything on the red list. Some companies are already hard at work developing alternates. And suppliers are beginning to do all new product development with an eye on not using anything that has a Red List chemical in it. Bottom line is we are not done when it comes to passing on a safe world to our children. We still have miles to go before we sleep…