Are there any sustainable materials? What does that even mean?

Near the end of another exciting and exhausting Greenbuild, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with three other women deeply invested in sustainable material management: Lindsay James, InterfaceFlor; Gail Vittori, Center for Maximum Building Potential Building Systems, and Sarah Brooks, Natural Step Canada. We started the session with the question "Are there any sustainable materials?" and ended with the question " What does material stewardship look like in a sustainable society?"

In between these two questions lives a world of aspiration and complexity followed, if you're lucky--or defiant--by deeper aspiration. The thing is, this stuff is hard. It's complicated and can be messy. Simple answers can lead to different problems. The deeper answers we need to figure out together--no one can single-handedly provide the roadmap.

What became very clear to us as a panel, in all our discussions leading up to Greenbuild, was that we wanted to continue and deepen the conversation. It is our belief that the shift toward sustainable materials--and likely sustainability in general--will require dialogue across boundaries.

We asked the audience--"What new or different questions can you ask when considering material sustainability and material stewardship?" and here's what they said:

• How do we change the economic model? What is the new model?
• Who can I work with who's thinking about this stuff?
• Maybe we should match the durability of a building product to the length of time it'll be used.
• Can we achieve sustainability in the context of exponential growth of demand and an exploding global population?
• Is sustainability a thing we can achieve--or a process we embark on? Does what it is depend on regional needs?
• What do your competitors or critics say about your product? (If they don't answer, then don't work with them).
• We need to form our own definition of quality. Ask manufacturers: are you helping or hurting?

The questions we brought to the table:

• What if we acted like our quality of life depended on Nature and each other?
• What if we saw our economic system as a design problem instead of a design constraint?
• What if our materials contributed to creating conditions for health?
• What if we could have more happiness with less stuff?

What other deeper questions do we all need to be asking? Who needs to be in the conversation? What are the best forums out there now for getting to the heart of the challenge we face in materials management, and what's still missing? If you'd like to be part of this continued conversation comment on this blog post.