“It was a great example of how having an integrated design strategy is more valuable than ever,” Tedhams says. “The composites industry is always looking for opportunities to advance and grow, so we should all understand how LEED and other initiatives like it are evolving. Doing so will improve how we go after business.”
Behind the Push to Disclose Ingredients
Before LEED was introduced in 1998, buildings essentially were constructed as a series of independent systems. Those elements – roofs, panels, heating systems, etc. – were basically put in place to keep the outdoors out. LEED challenged that status quo, supporting the notion that buildings are more like living organisms with interconnected parts.
On the heels of the November 2013 launch of LEED v4, the program has gone from a set of aspirations to a marketplace standard, mainly because energy efficiency and sustainability goals have become commonplace, says Bob Moffit, product manager at Ashland Performance Materials in Dublin, Ohio, and chair of ACMA’s Green Composites Council.
Energy-efficient buildings once seemed nice; now many decision-makers deem them necessary. They help to decrease utility costs, use less water, consume fewer resources and reduce the environmental footprint on the planet.
“With heightened interest in sustainability and LEED certification, more builders are looking beyond traditional materials for green alternatives,” Moffit says. “Composites are a great option, if the builders can find the fabricators to provide the right materials. This is what our industry needs – a chance for the building community to hear of the value composites can offer, like design flexibility, durability, low weight and dimensional stability. It’s what building specifiers want to hear.”
But today, what those specifiers see can be even more important. They want proof that materials used for building construction lack potential environmental and safety hazards. To that end, more architecture and design firms are placing limits on who they’ll work with and what products they’ll put in showrooms, Moffit says.
The USGBC isn’t the only organization driving the increased commitment to green materials, says Ken Schmidtchen, engineering manager at Kalwall Corporation in Manchester, N.H. Groups like the HPD Collaborative (hpdcollaborative.org) are also responsible for the transparency push.
HPD stands for “Health Product Declaration.” It’s a public statement of product content and risks associated with exposure to individual ingredients. HPDs are written into LEED v4 as a tool for measuring point requirements. The HPD Collaborative, supported by large firms from the architectural and design community, makes available a standardized format for disclosure of product contents, emissions and health information. The format is intended to help designers, building owners and others make informed purchasing decisions.
“If I’m making a composite part, I need to report all ingredients used and the potential hazards of those ingredients – not just on my polyester resin, glass and filler, but also details back upstream,” says Schmidtchen. “The struggle a lot of people have with the HPD Collaborative is that a composite is a cured state, so it’s much different from a hazard standpoint than the individual ingredients used to make the polymer, glass or filler. For better or worse, the HPD assesses the hazards of those individual raw materials like it does the product itself. The good news is the group hasn’t chipped its standard into stone. They seem to be open to revision and modification based on cogent input from manufacturers.”
