Harvard’s Healthier Building Academy Healthier Materials Playbook

When your organization buys products for its buildings, manufacturers seldom provide an ingredient label like you get with food. And those that do provide building materials labels rarely, if ever, indicate whether they contain forever chemicals. As a result, we’re essentially flying blind. To truly understand what risks you’re taking on, you need to know exactly what’s in your wall and floor coverings, furnishings, and workplace accessories. So, the first step in our playbook is simply to get an ingredient list for every product you’re adding. You might do the same for those already purchased, though we realize that financial realities might prevent you from replacing items before their end-of-life. If that’s the case, simply focus on the future. Tell your suppliers that you want Health Product Declarations for any new building products you buy.

Next, tell your suppliers you want to purchase products guaranteeing that there are no forever chemicals in their product. Don’t just specify particular well-known forever chemicals to avoid, like PFOA or PFOS or others that have been put on a “red list.” (recall that there are over 10,000 forever chemicals, so limiting one or two won’t address the problem.) Tell them you don’t want any of them. This is to avoid what has been termed “regrettable substitution,” where a potentially toxic but less scrutinized chemical cousin to a well-studied one is used as a replacement. This “class-based” approach – treating forever chemicals as a large group, rather than one-by-one avoidance – will help you to future-proof your decisions.