For the past five years, Google has been running its own Healthy Materials program, which evaluates products for their potential health risks to employees.
That program worked fine when Google was just renting space and only had to worry about things like off gassing from furniture or paint. But when the search engine giant got into ground-up construction, “we were running into a lot of commodities” whose content wasn’t always transparent, says Drew Wenzel, Google’s campus design technical specialist. Consequently, the company wasn’t getting answers about products fast enough to make informed design, construction, and cost decisions.
“We tried to do this ourselves on one big project, and then asked ourselves if there was a better way,” says Wenzel.
That better way, he believes, is the Quartz Project, a year-long collaborative effort that Google entered into with Healthy Building Network, think step (a sustainable software provider), and Flux. Quartz Project is providing what it touts to be the AEC industry’s first free and open-source initiative that brings health and environmental information on 100 building products into a single database.
“Too many design decisions are still being made without the benefit of this information,” Drew tells BD+C. This database, he explains, allows designers and engineers to incorporate the data into existing analytical and design tools.
The Quartz Project launched its database at the VERGE 2015 conference in late October. Since then, “there’s been a lot of excitement in the AEC community” about the product, says Vivian Dien, a product manager for Flux and its Quartz Project Lead. The collaborative will be giving demos of its portal at Greenbuild in Washington D.C. next week.
This database offers product profiles for 100 commonly used building materials, from acoustical ceiling panels to XPS insulation. The information for each product includes its general composition, impurities, health profile (the product’s various health risks as a percentage of its total content weight), and environmental profile (such as Cradle-to-gate LCA results, end-of-life treatment, and so forth).
Dien says Healthy Building Network did an extensive scan of existing research and information to assemble this database. HBN was also charged with vetting the information.
The main value of this database, say Dien and Wenzel, is aggregating and standardizing product data into an open-source environment. They are quick to note, though, that the Quartz Project has avoided assigning specific health risks to individual products. “The risk portion needs to be carefully thought out,” says Wenzel. “We hope that software engineers will look at this database to develop tools that can integrate this information into a Revit model to have conversations early in the design process.”
They also see this database as a “benchmark,” which can be used to understand a product’s health baseline and to track improvements.
The Quartz Project is the industry’s latest effort to bring greater transparency to product content. Other prominent groups in this arena include the Health Product Declaration Collaborative, an open-standard format for reporting material content and potential health hazards; and The Cradle-to-Cradle Institute, with its five levels of certification for products as they travel a path to meet the organization’s criteria for material health, reutilization, renewable energy and carbon management, water stewardship, and social fairness.
Wenzel views those other sources as “predominantly” for products “that are unique or highly controlled.” Whereas the primary purpose of the Quartz Project’s database, he says, is as “an early-phase design tool.”
Related Stories
Building Materials | Jun 1, 2016
MIT study: Microscopic structure of natural materials can inspire better concrete
Bones and sea sponges are highly organized at the molecular level, while concrete consists of random composites.
Sponsored | Building Materials | May 25, 2016
Materials Manufactured to Move Protect Southwest Energy’s New Office
Codes and Standards | May 20, 2016
Industry leaders call for wider use of bamboo as a building material
Benefits include seismic resiliency and sustainability.
Building Materials | Apr 8, 2016
AIA: Architects release first white paper on materials transparency and risk
It provides the steps architects should be taking to ensure change, promote openness, and increase collaboration between themselves, their suppliers, and their clients.
Market Data | Feb 26, 2016
JLL upbeat about construction through 2016
Its latest report cautions about ongoing cost increases related to finding skilled laborers.
| Jan 28, 2016
AIA CES class: The rainscreen approach to a better building envelope
Building envelope expert Bradley Carmichael of Hoffmann Architects explains how rainscreen wall systems work and evaluates the effectiveness of various rain-control methods, including mass walls, perfect barriers, and masonry veneers. This AIA/CES class is worth 1.0 learning unit.
Building Materials | Jan 25, 2016
Johnson Controls to merge with Tyco International
The $20 billion deal is the latest corporate inversion maneuver.
Concrete | Jan 15, 2016
Fallingwater to Sydney Opera House: Ranking the world’s best concrete buildings
Large and small, some of the most iconic structures of all time were made of the composite building material.
| Jan 14, 2016
How to succeed with EIFS: exterior insulation and finish systems
This AIA CES Discovery course discusses the six elements of an EIFS wall assembly; common EIFS failures and how to prevent them; and EIFS and sustainability.