Kelly: (00:06 )
Welcome to buildings and beyond.

Robb: (00:09 )
the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly: (00:13 )
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18 )
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19 )
and I’m KellyWestby.

Robb: (00:22 )
In this episode I talked with CharleyStevenson from integrated eco strategy about sustainable materials and healthy materials. He’s been looking at this for a decade or more- healthy materials and buildings, and I really learned a lot. This is something that I am finding that I’m more and more interested in. We talked for a long time, quite a long time, so long that we had to edit it down and break this up into a couple episodes, but I’d learned tons. I hope you get something from it too. In this episode, for the first 10 or 15 minutes, we talked about mostly about the living building challenge, which is a program that I’ll let Charleydescribe in more detail, but healthy materials is a big piece of the program. And then we talk about how to find out information about materials, what databases are out there, how to source sustainable materials, what to ask manufacturers, who is keeping track of all this info. And listening back to the episode, actually I realized we threw out a few abbreviations that I thought maybe would be good to define up front. HPD is a health product declaration, ILFI by International Living Future Institute, which is in charge of the living building challenge program, and SDS’s or MSDS’s are safety data sheets or materials safety data sheets. I thought those might be helpful if you are not familiar with those, but here is part one my interview with CharleyStevenson.

Robb: (02:03 )
Well first of all, thank you for being here. This is an important topic. Healthy materials, sustainable materials. And I know you are very involved with living building challenge projects. Yes?

Charley: (02:17 )
Correct. We started our first living building challenge project in early 2011. And that seems like a long time ago.

Robb: (02:30 )
Yeah. Right. And I listened to the green architects lounge podcast and they talked about the living building challenge project or two and they mentioned you and they mentioned that the materials pedal, the materials piece, is the toughest. Do you hear that a lot?

Charley: (02:50 )
so I would put it this way, the materials pedal is the biggest surprise among the challenging pedals. So you know, in living building challenge there are seven pedals, three of them are highlighted as particularly challenging energy, water and materials. The energy pedal requires net zero or in some cases net positive energy. And I think there are lots of rules of thumb that have evolved over the, over the years. And project teams can look to a pretty substantial set of case studies and understand, you know, generally things are converging toward heat pumps and triple pane windows and you know, certain levels of, of air infiltration. And in so doing they can pretty reliably get to net zero energy. The water petals is a different kind of a challenge simply because it’s a regulatory challenge and an operations challenge. You know, the requirement that a project produce and treat all of its own water on site, by and large from rainwater, theres a way to do it, if youre outside of a city, with groundwater and and a pretty standard septic system. But in places where there’s municipal water and municipal sewer convincing first a client and then later a regulator that it’s a good idea not to use that system water is an effort. So I think the water pedal will remain a challenge for the reason that you’re replacing, you know, small sections of pipe with technical systems that need to be designed well and then really relying upon rainwater, other precipitation and, and then sort of continuous operation issues. And again, there’s practice there and there are precedents there. That’s a bigger lift in terms of scope than net zero energy is at this point are net positive energy is at this point.

Robb: (05:25 )
Yeah, that also makes sense. It seems like a bigger, more non traditional systems and approaches.

Charley: (05:32 )
right, at the single family level it can be very straightforward. I mean there are a lot of LPC projects in suburban or rural areas where it looks a lot like a conventional drilled well in a conventional septic system and that meets the intent of the living building challenge, presu