Health & Happiness Petal

PETAL INTENT

The intent of the Health + Happiness Petal is to focus on the most important conditions that must be present to create products and materials that truly benefit consumers. The Petal is not designed to address all potential ways that goods can compromise society. Instead, it aims to encourage the creation of items whose purpose is to holistically protect and enhance the physical and emotional wellness of the people who manufacture, install and use them.

This Petal focuses in particular on the toxicological impact of materials on both human and environmental health. Persistent Bioaccumulative Toxic chemicals from product manufacturing, use and disposal are building up in our environment with significant consequences for human and ecosystem health. Many of the goods we use in our daily lives are harmful to our health and well-being, and some goods greatly diminish human potential. It is crucial for manufacturers of all products to first identify what is in their products, remove the most harmful materials and then look more carefully at chemical and material alternatives to continually raise the bar until we reach a materials economy where healthy materials are the only option.

Materials used in products have health implications not only for consumers, but also for the people who manufacture these products, their parts and contractors who install them. Materials considerations take all of these stakeholders into account. Additionally, many manufacturing facilities have substandard conditions for the health and productivity of workers. It is rare for a manufacturing facility to prioritize health-and-wellness as we are starting to expect in homes and offices. By focusing on the major pathways where manufacturing can impact health—the materials used in products, the spaces in which they are made, and the surrounding communities—we can create a consumer society that is designed to optimize the human condition.

IDEAL CONDITIONS + CURRENT LIMTATIONS

The Living Product Challenge envisions a nourishing, highly productive and healthy modern world with consumer products that enrich our daily lives. However, even the most restorative products require acceptance by their users and engagement from their makers. It is difficult to ensure that goods will continue to optimally enhance health and happiness over time since available technologies and consumer preferences change quickly. It can also be complicated to ensure optimal use of products over their complete life cycles due to the unpredictable ways in which people use and maintain them. Finally, it will always be challenging to predict the unintended consequences from the use of any product, as almost anything created can be used in unforeseen ways. Those impacts may be unknown for many decades.

The precautionary principle guides all materials decisions when impacts are unclear. There are significant limitations to achieving the ideal for the materials realm. Although consumers and product buyers are starting to weigh social and environmental impacts in parallel with other more conventional considerations, such as aesthetics, function and cost, the biggest shortcoming is due to the market itself. While there are a huge number of “green” products for sale, there is also a shortage of good, publicly available data that backs up manufacturer claims and provides consumers with the ability to make conscious, informed choices. Transparency is vital; as a global community, the only way we can transform into a truly sustainable society is through open communication and honest information sharing. However, many manufacturers are wary of sharing trade secrets that they believe afford them a competitive advantage, and instead make proprietary claims about specific product contents.

Declare
Declare, the Institute’s “ingredients label for products” label and online database with a direct connection to the Living Building Challenge Materials Petal. While manufacturers often initially resist disclosure, most major building manufacturers are now recognizing the benefit of toxic-chemical avoidance and transparency through Declare. This movement in the building industry needs to be shared among new industries, such as consumer goods, electronics and apparel, to ensure that manufacturers are transparent with their customers. Since its start in 2012, Declare has grown rapidly to cover almost every building product category and is swiftly moving into consumer products. Third Party Verified Declare began in 2017 to provide added rigor by verifying ingredient and product claims through a trusted third party.

Transparent Material Health
A lack of toxicity and health information about many ingredients used in modern production means that a truly healthy product must go beyond just screening against a list of known problematic chemicals and disclosing them.

The Transparent Material Health Imperative requires the evaluation of substances with unknown impacts using rigorous hazard assessment tools to ensure known toxins are not replaced by chemicals with unknown toxicity or those likely to cause harm, known as regrettable substitution. The designation of Transparent Material Health is a high bar for definitively ensuring material health while maintaining the commitment to transparency that increases information in the market and accelerates transformation of the materials economy.