Hi Nancy,
You have a great point - materials information fatigue is setting in. We all feel it.
However, I think it may be a good thing that there is so much happening. It is an exciting time across the materials landscape and there are a lot of questions for which we are still trying to find answers, and a lot of progress being made across the industry. If our concerns and considerations about materials were narrow, relatively speaking, there would be a great chance that information would already be consolidated and our materials selections more clear. However, in the multi-attribute world that we live in, decision making is a lot more complicated. Do you prioritize embodied carbon? Other LCA considerations? Whether it meets a restricted ingredient list? Which list? (Note: The LBC Red List is approximately 800 CASRN long. When nested with BIFMA, REACH, LEED v4, WELL and other hazard lists referenced in LEED and WELL, the number of restricted CASRN baloons to about 1,800)
Green building frameworks have a varying set of requirements, and when coupled with data required thru specific corporate commitments, we are working to reference an incredible amount of constantly changing information. It's not easy and many tools approach the challenge in different ways, from master "spreadsheets," through reliance on direct APIs to the source information. And, each product has a different set of available information. Combining all of this makes for a fairly messy situation and it is unlikely that we will see a clear solution emerge in the next few years.
With this resource, we tried our best to help cut through some of the noise, but no doubt that there may be additional resourses out there. We concentrated on the most widely known platforms, and specificaly those that we think are most useful for LEED v4 project, and acknowledged several others in an opening paragraphs. I'd be interested in hearing about the other tools your learned of and whether you find them useful. We can always update this list!
Thanks for your feedback, John M
Add new comment
To post a comment, you need to register for a LEEDuser Basic membership (free) or login to your existing profile.