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.”
