Sustainable Minds®, the only provider of end-to-end product transparency solutions, is making advanced material practice accessible to any project team in the AECO (architecture, engineering, construction and operations) sector by automating material health selection criteria and reducing the time and effort needed to get a high-quality result to inform selection and specification. Today, it announces a game-changing filter for its Transparency Catalog™ in collaboration with Health Product Declaration® Collaborative (HPDC) and Perkins&Will®. The Precautionary List Free filter makes it possible for the AECO sector to select building products and materials that support stringent human health requirements for built spaces.  

The Transparency Catalog is the most comprehensive, curated, and continually updated source of high-performance, low-carbon, healthy building and construction products. The platform features all the manufacturers making products and materials for the North American market who have invested in product transparency documentation providing free access to all their documents – ISO 14025 type III environmental declarations (EPDs) and Health Product Declarations (HPDs). EPDs quantify environmental performance information on the life cycle of a product to enable comparisons between products fulfilling the same function. HPDs provide a full disclosure of the potential chemicals of concern by screening the ingredients against a set of priority human and environmental health ‘hazard’ lists based on the GreenScreen® for Safer Chemicals. In the HPD Open Standard v2.3 introduced in July 2022, screening is added from additional key restricted substances lists, including the Precautionary List from Perkins&Will.

Improving Product and Material Selection with Better Visibility into Data 

By providing visibility into both EPD and HPD data, Sustainable Minds helps users make informed decisions and showcases the manufacturers committed to making lower-carbon and/or healthier products, which is becoming more critical with the continued introduction of new and more stringent project standards and requirements. 

The new Perkins&Will Precautionary List Free filter is one of the latest initiatives to make it easier for the AECO sector to meet project goals through informed, simplified product and material selection. Through close collaboration between HPDC and Sustainable Minds, Transparency Catalog users can now access critical HPD data to identify the products that meet the requirements of the Precautionary List from Perkins&Will, a firm-wide mandate to screen all products being considered for projects for toxic chemicals (in more than 50 categories).

Supporting Healthy Material Selection through Collaboration with Perkins&Will

“Perkins&Will came to Sustainable Minds looking for a way to automate analyzing HPD results to easily find the products with no Precautionary List ingredients, which until now has been done by manual review,” explained Terry Swack, Founder and CEO of Sustainable Minds. “The urgency to transform the built environment is driving the need for more and better data, new workflows and smarter tools. It's critical to make the information easy to use, not just easy to find. Now, in one click, users can access all the products in every MasterFormat® section that meet Precautionary List requirements.”

Sustainable Minds uses data from the HPD Public Repository API to create this filter. Only manufacturers who have published v2.3 HPDs have the data to be displayed by this filter. It is easy for manufacturers to update and republish their existing HPDs to v2.3 using the HPD Builder so their products can be selected when the filter is used. To date, 2,639 v2.3 HPDs have been published and added to the Transparency Catalog. Users can now find 553 HPDs reporting Perkins&Will Precautionary List free products, with that number continually increasing as more HPDs are published.

Driving Improvements through Industry-Wide Collaboration

“The inclusion of the Perkins&Will Precautionary List in HPD v2.3 and the Sustainable Minds Transparency Catalog greatly improves the workflow for designers assessing the material health of building products and ultimately allows us to spend more time on our primary goal of optimizing our projects for human health impacts,” said Tori Wickard, Senior Project Architect and Senior Associate at Perkins&Will. “Additionally, it sends a signal to the industry that human health is still a top focus in addition to social health and equity, circularity, ecosystem and climate health.”

“Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a remarkable evolution of material health practices. Our collaboration with Sustainable Minds and Perkins&Will brings us closer to an era of new capabilities where it is possible to fully automate the once challenging job of processing massive amounts of information about the substances in products and their associated health impacts,” said Wendy Vittori, Executive Director at HPDC. 

“Sustainable Minds has always been on the leading edge of introducing these new capabilities for their customers, uniquely advancing the tools available to match product information to meet project needs,” continued Vittori. “HPD-reported data provides accurate, reliable and consistent information across products and manufacturers. These new features in the Transparency Catalog automate the complexities of hazard screening and make it simple to understand the results. With new capabilities such as this, the leading edge of material health practice is within the reach of any project team.”

For those interested in learning more about this collaboration, Sustainable Minds and the HPDC will host a webinar on Thursday, June 29, at 2 PM EST. During this session, they will discuss their ongoing partnership and shared vision of how automation will make advanced material screening within reach for any project team, the importance of and how to use the Precautionary List free filter in the Transparency Catalog, and more. To sign up for the webinar, visit https://register.gotowebinar.com/rt/207971956739411800. 

The Transparency Catalog and Precautionary List Free filter are free to use. Manufacturers, learn more about updating your HPDs to v2.3, visit the HPDC website here.