Charlestown’s Bunker Hill Housing Redevelopment project, which broke ground in June 2023 after an eight-year community planning process, promises 21st century comfort, energy efficiency and carbon reducing performance in its new mixed-income residential community. Located in an historic waterfront neighborhood, Boston’s oldest, much of this 1940s-era federal public housing site had fallen into disrepair. Now, in a public-private partnership, the team of Leggat McCall Properties and Joseph J. Corcoran Co., in partnership with the Boston Housing Authority and the Charlestown Resident Alliance, has developed and launched a $1.4 billion plan to replace 42 aging buildings with 15 new residential buildings, plus retail and community space. To strengthen the sense of community, the project features extensive green spaces and improved connections to the surrounding area.
News Releases
NORTH ADAMS, MA—The recent East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment underscored the peril that chemicals such as vinyl chloride—used to make PVC pipe, wire and cable coatings, and myriad other products—pose for communities across the U.S. as well as throughout the manufacturing supply chain, potentially menacing company workers, their fenceline neighborhoods, builders and installers. At the same time, colleges, corporations and property owners recognize that buildings with fewer chemical toxins are not only healthier, but good business—attracting students, employees and tenants while reducing occupant illness and absenteeism, and lowering hazmat liability during renovations and demolition.
NORTH ADAMS, MA—Green building services firm Integrated Eco Strategy (IES) and its team of Berkshire County researchers has helped Harvard University achieve Materials Petal certification in the Living Building Challenge (LBC)—the world’s most stringent green building performance standard—for a new Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) in Boston.
NORTH ADAMS, MA—Integrated Eco Strategy (IES), a consulting firm facilitating sustainable and regenerative building design, renovation and construction has signed the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Architecture & Design Materials Pledge letter. The AIA pledge commits IES—along with more than 85 other architects, designers and partner organizations—to seek materials transparency, collaboration and preferable products that support human, climate, ecosystem and social health for the projects that they undertake. In its role as a healthier materials consultant, IES has created the “Materials Pledge Action Plan” to help fellow signatories achieve their materials goals efficiently and cost-effectively.
In 2013, leading architecture firms joined forces to ask manufacturers to provide product transparency in standardized formats such as Health Product Declarations or Declare labels. In response, leading manufacturers formed the Living Products 50 (LP50) and would work, they promised, “to ensure that healthy, high performing building materials with full ingredient transparency are the rule, not the exception.”
In 2018, LP50 alerted architects that they had provided documentation and improved products, but that offering greener materials was not boosting sales. Now, they said, it was the design industry’s turn to step up—or risk losing better products that were not delivering a suitable return on the manufacturers’ investment.
As a result, the AIA Materials Pledge was created, committing IES and other signatories to a range of responsive actions. These include specifying and purchasing healthier products; eliminating the use of hazardous substances; and supporting human, climate and ecosystem health in their product choices.
IES’ Materials Pledge Action Plan provides project teams with customized training, setup, tools and support to immediately begin incorporating healthier materials. In addition to straightforward assistance on products and processes, the Action Plan includes use of IES’ proprietary Red2Green (R2G) healthy materials management platform, incorporating a database of more than 15,000 previously researched products from 3,500 manufacturers. R2G also includes concise guidance, by product-type, for researching any new product, email templates for research and advocacy and full documentation storage.
“IES was delighted to sign on to this AIA initiative, which is more vital now than perhaps ever in history,” said Charley Stevenson, IES owner and principal. “Our organization has been researching and sourcing healthier materials for more than a decade, but we seek continual improvement, including new ways to ‘close the loop,’ on transparency and demonstrate to manufacturers the economic results of their efforts.
“Our Red2Green healthy materials database incorporates mechanisms to choose the best possible materials now, to lock in progress at each step and to provide feedback to manufacturers,” Stevenson said. “In signing the Materials Pledge, we have doubled down on our effort to ensure that each new project we work on—either directly, or by supplying software and support—can be the healthiest building we’ve ever created.”
Amy Johns has been named senior strategy consultant for Integrated Eco Strategy (IES), a consulting firm facilitating sustainable and regenerative building design, renovation and construction. In this new position, Johns will help expand IES’s services to include carbon reduction plans and sustainability strategy and policy implementation, provide technical and logistical support for external reviews and assist in software development. Also, it shouldn’t go without mentioning this year ILFI awarded Johns with the Living Future Hero award for her environmental advocacy!
Founded in 2010, Integrated Eco Strategy (IES) supports project teams as they pursue the world’s most challenging green building design standards, by facilitating sustainable and regenerative building design, renovation and construction. The company is recognized as a pioneer in helping project teams create Full Living buildings. To efficiently navigate and attain the Living Building Challenge’s Materials Petal, arguably the most rigorous LBC facet, IES has developed an innovative, industry-leading approach to researching and classifying healthy building materials.
NORTH ADAMS, MA—Integrated Eco Strategy (IES) and Toxnot announce a new partnership designed to integrate their respective materials transparency platforms. This partnership enables manufacturers to quickly and efficiently share building product ingredient data and meet the requirements of certifications such as the Living Building Challenge (LBC) and Declare in new, powerful ways.
For Immediate Release:
May 8, 2018
Contact: Charley Stevenson, Owner & Principal
Integrated Eco Strategy, LLC
85 Main St. North Adams, MA 01247
413-884-2571
charley@integratedecostrategy.com
Photographs available upon request
IES Unveils Healthy Materials Management System in Partnership with International Living Future Institute
NORTH ADAMS, MA—Finding building materials that won’t harm human health is now simpler and easier with the introduction of Red2Green (R2G), a new platform that slashes the time and effort required to pursue the ambitious requirements of the Living Building Challenge by crowdsourcing and documenting key materials health data for building and construction materials.
“Pioneering design teams no longer need to start from scratch identifying Red List materials. With R2G, each project builds on the last, crowdsourcing vital information that will help make healthy buildings and regenerative design the norm,” said Charley Stevenson, IES owner and principal. “R2G was created by architects and construction professionals, for our peers.”
R2G’s interactive platform is organized by product type—from framing and wet-applied finishes to plumbing and electrical equipment – and assesses chemical composition and off-gassing potential; documents sustainably harvested wood parts; determines manufacturing proximity; and weighs manufacturers’ transparency about products. Results are shared among all users, ensuring a growing and constantly improving information library.
R2G was developed by Integrated Eco Strategy (IES), a Massachusetts-based firm that helps institutions, designers, consultants and others achieve sustainable and regenerative building design, renovation and construction. Coinciding with the industry-wide release of R2G, IES has partnered with the non-profit International Living Future Institute (ILFI), which administers the Living Building Challenge (LBC) program—the world’s most rigorous performance standard for buildings. At the Living Future unConference 2018 held May 1-4 in Portland, Oregon, ILFI presented R2G as an important platform for those seeking to build using the healthiest materials available.
“Red2Green helps accelerate our goal of a Living Future by simplifying the materials selection process for Living Buildings,” said James Connelly, vice president of products and strategic growth for ILFI, “It is a platform with potential to transform the marketplace for healthy materials by making the research process clear, simplifying materials selection and organizing project audit documentation, all in one place.”
R2G supports LBC “materials petal” compliance—specifically that buildings use products and materials free of the worst-in-class toxins. ILFI and IES stressed that although IES will license R2G, it is a neutral platform and now available to all project teams, including independent sustainability consultants. IES will train and support other firms to become experts in using it, helping the LBC community grow more quickly.
IES was founded in 2010 to provide client-focused, high-value green building services. Recent IES projects include the Class of 1966 Environmental Center at Williams College, Williamstown; R.W. Kern Center at Hampshire College, and Hitchcock Center for the Environment, both in Amherst; and Yale Divinity School Campus, New Haven CT.
Integrated Eco Strategy provides material/product research support via a proprietary healthy materials database: Red2Green. For additional information, visit materiallybetter.com.
NORTH ADAMS, MA—Finding building materials that won’t harm human health is now simpler and easier with the introduction of Red2Green (R2G), a new platform that slashes the time and effort required to pursue the ambitious requirements of the Living Building Challenge by crowdsourcing and documenting key materials health data for building and construction materials.
NORTH ADAMS, MA—Finding building materials that won’t harm human health is now simpler and easier with the introduction of Red2Green (R2G), a new platform that slashes the time and effort required to pursue the ambitious requirements of the Living Building Challenge by crowdsourcing and documenting key materials health data for building and construction materials.