Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, I received an email with the subject line: “The Google spinoff tracking toxics in buildings.” Google tracking toxics? What is this?
So I clicked through to the article GreenBiz: Google, thinksetp, Flux and their database of building materials’ enviro impact
I had to see this. www.quartzproject.org
The Mission:
The Quartz Project is an open data initiative that promotes the transparency of building products. Our goal is to drive market transformation towards less toxic, lower-impact materials for better buildings and healthier communities.
It’s an interesting site. They’ve analyzed 101 common building products. “For the first time, both life cycle impact and health hazard data are integrated into an open database>” Read the Methodology page. It’s pretty interesting.
I’m going to walk you through it because it took me a while to figure it out.
I went to a product (acoustical ceiling panels) . You’ll see a general description and then there are 5 big headlines. When you click on the headlines, they open to give more information.
I clicked on “General Composition” and saw two components: gypsum and PVC. There’s a column called “Health Hazards” that drops down to a list of hazards with colored boxes next to them, but I’m not sure what this means.
Then I clicked on “Impurities.” Impurities? Apparently these are all the chemicals that are in the two components. There are 27 impurities listed for the two components. Things like formaldehyde, mercury, lead, a few radioactive materials.
Then there is a “Health Profile” and an “Environmental Profile”, and a comprehensive “Sources” list, with each title linked to the actual source material.
But what interests me most are these impurities. I’ve never seen this disclosed before. This is a whole new level of looking at toxics. A whole new level of disclosure. It turns out there is a whole field of “toxic impurities” that we never see as consumers. I’m starting to research this and will be writing more about it in the future.
This level of data kind of makes current product labeling look really inadequate.
But I have to say, knowing about all the impurities didn’t make a difference for me in terms of evaluating the toxicity of the product. It just reinforced my earlier decision not to use this product. I rejected it years ago because of the PVC. I don’t need to know all the impurities in PVC to know it’s toxic. PVC has already been established as a toxic plastic. But it does need to be known to formulators, so they can work to eliminate them.
Great start. I’d like to see this data for every product. It’s like looking through a toxics microscope.
