Pharos Project: Nutrition Labels For Building Materials

Over 3 billion tons of building materials are bought each year according to the Healthy Building Network. All of them take energy, natural resources, and complex processes to produce, break down, and reuse. Similar to food ingredients, some our better for us. It all depends on what went into producing the products and how those ingredients impact our bodies, or in this case, our planet, habitats, ecosystems, climate, air quality, or social and community elements. But, which ones are better to use than others? What building materials are safer and create less of an impact than others.

Unless your a material science engineer or spend your time researching supply chains and factory processing, it's going to be difficult to tell. Thanks to the Healthy Building Network, this will become a lot easier with their deployment of the Pharos Project.

The Pharos Project is a framework for evaluating and displaying information to help consumers and builders make better decisions on the building materials that they purchase. You can think of these labels like nutrition labels on food packaging. The difference is that they provide better visualizations and information pertaining to how the specific building material impacts health & pollution, environment & resources, and social & community aspects. The diagram, also called the Pharos Lens, displays the severity of impact through a circular bar chart to easily make building material comparisons.

By educating the buyer, the Pharos Project aims to "define a consumer-driven vision of truly green building materials and establish a method for  evaluation that is in harmony with principles of environmental health and justice. The Project's foundation is a partnership, pairing those who use building materials with those who study product's impacts on the environment."

If you're interested, you can signup and get involved using the Pharos online web application.