Transparent Future

Nadav Malin, a member of the Health Product Declaration Pilot Committee, expands on the need for transparency as part of EcoHome magazine's Vision 2020 series.

Nadav Malin, president of BuildingGreen and board member of the Health Product Declaration Collaborative, recently expanded on the need for transparency and HPDs as part of EcoHome magazine’s Vision 2020 program. In his essay, "Transparent Future," he writes,

"The HPD specifies how ingredients should be listed and defines a series of reference lists that determine if there are any health hazards associated with any of those ingredients.

If there are, those hazards also have to be reported on the form­—not unlike Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs), which have been common for decades. While MSDSs focus on acute health risks, HPDs extend that focus to include risks from long-term, chronic exposures.

The HPD aims for 100 percent disclosure—users want to know about all the ingredients in a product, not just a few benign ones. But it also includes an option for companies to keep some ingredients secret as long as they report any health hazards associated with those undisclosed ingredients.

Transparency is not just about access to data. We already have more data than we can possibly process. According to IDC, by 2010 we had generated more than a zetabyte of data—that’s 15 zeros after the 1—and that number is expected to grow nearly fiftyfold by 2020.

The challenge is getting data that we can trust in a form that we can understand and use. And that moves the conversation directly into questions of values, politics, and power.

Who do you trust? How should you interpret the data you’re getting? And more important, what should you do about it?"

Read the full essay here.

 
Aiming to standardize the way building product manufacturers report the contents, chemical hazards, emissions, and health effects of their products, the Health Product Declaration (HPD) Open Standard Version 1 is now available for public use.
The HPD Open Standard Version 1, which can be downloaded for free at hpdcollaborative.org, is not a new set of reporting documents, but rather a format to be used in existing and future documents to provide consistency in reported information. HPDs, for example, are included in revisions to LEED v4 for use in verifying chemical content in products. It is written to be complementary to lifecycle analysis tools to assist in the development of environmental product declarations. Adoption of the standard is voluntary.
The standard was created by a pilot committee of 29 building product manufacturers and 50 expert reviewers from across the building industry. The format for reporting was tested in pilot form by 30 manufacturers and reviewed by 50 users, and the new open standard format allows the reporting structure to be licensed freely, with the goal of continuing to evolve the standard over time. The standard will be managed by the Health Product Declaration Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that is governed by a 15-member volunteer board of directors. The collaborative, which had 46 founding sponsors, is led by interim executive director Meredith Elbaum, former director of sustainable design at Sasaki, and chair Peter Syrett of Perkins+Will. 
“We believe in transparency and that it is essential for people to know what is in building products,” says Syrett. “We also believe that to bring about transparency, it should be easy for manufacturers to tell the story of their materials in a forthright, clear, and standardized format. This is the value of the Health Product Declaration as a tool.”
The collaborative will hold a press conference to discuss HPD Open Standard Version 1 during the Greenbuild Conference and Expo, at 4 p.m. on Nov. 14, at Interface’s exhibit booth in the South Hall (1413S). The standard, along with the full list of founding sponsors, the board of directors, pilot program participants, and pilot committee members is in the full press release,  online here.