A Common Demand for Sustainable Building Products

Registration Information:

To register for this course - please reserve your seat for the "Building Materials Summit" located in the Greenbuild agenda.

Registering for the session holds your seat in the class until 5 minutes prior to the scheduled start time. At that time your seat in the session can no longer be guaranteed.

If a workshop or session is full, you will not be able to add it to your agenda; however, if you have the appropriate pass you will be able to enter the session on a first-come first-served basis 5 minutes prior to the scheduled start of the event so long as capacity has not been reached

Greenbuild staff at the entrance of the session have the ability to stop permitting entrance to the session when the room hits the set capacity.

Description:

Imagine a world where architects, designers, and manufacturers seamlessly access comprehensive sustainability data within their existing design and procurement tools. This world enables the quantification of holistic products' impacts across social health equity, human health, carbon, biodiversity, and circularity within buildings. We, as an industry, have done incredible work to be able to quantify the operational impacts of buildings. To get the full picture of the impact of a building, we must also consider the impacts of the products used to create the building itself. Over the past decade, mindful MATERIALS, a nonprofit dedicated to mitigating the built environment's embodied impacts, has pursued this vision. With the 2022 Common Materials Framework release and 2023 Forum launch, progress towards this goal has accelerated. Previous efforts faltered due to a lack of collective alignment, common language, trustworthy data, and accessible technology. However, the establishment of the CMF, and mM’s vision, offers a foundation for unified action. mindful MATERIALS acknowledges concurrent alignment initiatives and emphasizes the need for synergy to ensure success. The Path to the Materials’ Easy Button, presented here, outlines strategies for navigating this collaborative journey toward a connected data ecosystem. The Forums have endeavored to endorse a shared data ecosystem, advocating for data sharing among owners, manufacturers, architects, and designers. This unified approach can stimulate the interconnectedness of the data ecosystem. This work serves as a guide for organizations to align with this initiative, fostering a collective demand for quality data and incentivizing ecosystem connectivity. In essence, the vision is for stakeholders to navigate toward a future where sustainability data is seamlessly integrated into industry practices. Through collaborative efforts and a shared commitment to a common language and data transparency, the industry can drive meaningful progress toward a more sustainable built environment.