By Charley Stevenson
🎧 Listen to thIS story
4 min. 25 sec.
Returning from Living Future 2025, I felt what I imagine many others did: a renewed sense of purpose, surrounded by brilliant people trying to shift an industry toward a more just, healthier future. It’s impossible not to be inspired by that energy. And yet, as I listened to presentation after presentation, a familiar tension reemerged—the gap between what we aspire to and what actually gets done.
At Materially Better, we live in that space between vision and reality. Our job is to close the gap—not just for one project, but for entire portfolios. That’s where I believe the next phase of the materials movement is headed. It’s where our consulting practice, powered by our Red2Green healthier materials library and project management platform, plays a catalytic role.
The Materials Movement: From V1 to V3
Looking back, I see the evolution of the healthier materials movement in three broad phases:
- Version 1.0 was about compliance and basics—LEED credits, VOC limits, recycled content. Important first steps, but not enough to shift the manufacturing landscape toward healthier product options across the majority of product types.
- Version 2.0 pushed deeper, embracing red list avoidance, the Living Building Challenge, and transparency tools like HPDs and Declare labels. It was powerful, but intensely manual—built on spreadsheets, custom consulting, countless research hours, and deep expertise. Valuable, but not broadly accessible or scalable.
- Version 3.0, the phase we’re building now, is about replication, relevance, and real-world results. It’s consulting supported by robust data. It’s project management that includes materials thinking, not as a separate task, but as a built-in layer of decision-making. It’s not a new standard or requirement to meet—it’s a smarter way to deliver on the goals you already have.
Turning Vision into Action
Living Future 2025 was a powerful reminder of how the Living Future Institute has reshaped the sustainability conversation—shifting mindsets and inspiring change. But unless we translate it into repeatable practices and measurable outcomes, we risk spinning our wheels. At Materially Better, we help clients turn inspiration into implementation—through a model that blends expert consulting with purpose-built tools.
Our Red2Green platform is not something our clients have to learn. It’s what we use behind the scenes to do our job better. It houses a deeply vetted, sustainability-scored healthier materials library aligned with CSI MasterSpec categorization, incorporates the Common Materials Framework for industry language consistency, and integrates valuable data from Declare, HPDC, Carbon Leadership Forum, and Cradle2Cradle.
This is what allows us to deliver:
- Healthier product selections that align with your design and performance goals
- Project- and portfolio-level reporting that tracks real impact
- Certificate-agnostic scoring that clarifies what’s better—not just what’s singularly certified
- Scalable frameworks that let you replicate wins across multiple projects
No more one-off spreadsheets. No more heroic effort just to do the right thing once. With our support, doing better becomes the default.
The Real Work of Change
I’m often asked: what’s the next big thing in healthier materials? My answer is always the same: scale. Not in the sense of growing complexity—but in delivering simplicity and reliability across many projects.
Theodore Roosevelt is credited with saying, “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
That’s exactly what Materially Better empowers our clients to do. We don’t ask for perfection. We provide the tools, the insights, and the guidance to help teams take meaningful steps—right now, with the resources they already have and the building materials the market currently offers.
We don’t need new ideals—we need new ways to make those ideals actionable at every stage of design and construction. That’s what V3 is all about. That’s what Materially Better is built to support.
So yes, I left Living Future inspired. But more importantly, I came home resolved. The time for action is now. The tools to act already exist. And the pathway to healthier materials is clearer than ever—if you have the right partner.
Let’s build what’s next—together.
Charley Stevenson, LFA, LEED AP, Founder. With the Materially Better team, Charley has developed processes and software to integrate better materials selections into all project types and to transform the market as quickly and easily as possible.
