Make Every Building Materially Better
We have a simple goal: ensure that each new project can be the healthiest you’ve ever created. We employ the industry’s leading building product ingredient screen, the LBC’s Red List, to evaluate the building materials and product types your team requires. The result is a steady and thorough transformation of your materials palette, accomplished in the most efficient, effective manner possible.
Red2Green incorporates the components necessary to choose the best possible materials now and to signal to all markets that future products must become better. Features such as advocacy, record keeping and decision-making criteria can be adapted to achieve a fully customized and maximally impactful approach.
Materials selection involves many factors: performance, durability, cost, embodied carbon, water impacts, human and ecosystem health. Of these, health impacts cannot be offset, because the impact is on individuals throughout the product’s life cycle.
Our approach
Leveraging our experience in project delivery, including our involvement in more than 50 LBC buildings, each project starts with creation of a responsibility matrix to ensure that roles are defined and clear cut. Materials selection begins with the best products in high-impact and widely used product types, while noting the benefits to occupants and the environmental justice benefits beyond the project’s boundaries. Over time, additional product types can be added in, as a result of continual targeted advocacy and ongoing research and reporting.
Our process efficiently locks in progress at every step, transferring data and process wisdom from one project to the next. As a result, this ratcheting process assures that each ensuing project can be the healthiest building your team has ever built.
Essential components
- Commitment from project leaders (owner, designers, construction manager)
- Establishment of measurable goals
- Well-defined process for each stakeholder at each scale
Tools to facilitate each project
- Library of over 14,000 products
- Software for tracking decisions and reporting on progress
- Streamlined scripts for ingredient requests and advocacy to manufacturers
- Straightforward workflow for product-level approvals
- Tracking through design and construction administration, enabling beneficial feedback
Lessons that shape our approach
- Make product-level decisions in the context of the market: what is good enough?
- Adopt the requirements of a common platform (LBC), enabling the focus to be on data acquisition and advocacy, not education
- Avoid performance language that shifts responsibility to others: make good product selections when possible and communicate them explicitly through specifications
- Consider these factors when prioritizing efforts:
- prevalence of products in the specific project type
- scale of potential health impacts to occupants, installers, manufacturers, and neighbors
- balance of easy wins and strategic efforts to address lagging market sectors