Green Materials: How Do You Know What’s Good?

March 28, 2018

Materials really do matter to the health of occupants and the environment, but the ingredients are not easy to discern.  To perform, material composition involve tradeoffs with how sustainable, floodproof, or healthy these ingredients are.  With tens of thousands of unregulated chemicals in building products, how many are toxic?  How does one predict reliability and longevity of a product, especially in the post-Harvey reality?  How much data is available regarding life-cycle assessments and embodied energy, and the manufacturing process regarding byproducts, pollution, and transportation?  Is there any opportunity for reuse or real recycling of new materials, and what are opportunities for reusing salvaged materials, and how safe and resilient are they?  Not to mention cost.

These two speakers deal with building materials and gathering information for the building industry in an attempt to  facilitate intelligent deployment for a better built environment.