Bringing more benign materials into the built environment
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MATERIAL MATTERS
Bringing more benign materials into the built environment By Sara Tepfer
W
e spend 90% of our time indoors, which means that the design of our built environments has the potential to greatly affect our health and well-being. Architectural design for human health can be traced back for many generations, but only recently have questions surrounding design and human health been extended to the material and chemical scales. Driven by a widespread interest in “healthy buildings” and the mitigation of the many health hazards posed by chemicals in building materials, architects are increasingly interested in the chemistries of the materials they use. This new interest requires collaboration and technical knowledge transfer from chemistry, materials science, and environmental health science to architecture. Historically, collaboration among these many disciplines has mostly been driven by regulation (e.g., asbestos abatement). More recently, however, the dialogue is shifting from the regulatory to the market sphere, and with this shift has come a host of design guidance, green building certification criteria, and collective knowledge growth around the challenges and opportunities at the interface of materials science, environmental health science, and architecture. Arup* and the American Institute of Architects recently published a guidance
report examining this intersection. The Prescription for Healthier Building Materials: A Design and Implementation Protocol presents an introductory review of the knowledge around healthier building materials and the opportunities and challenges in translating this knowledge to architectural practice. This article presents the findings of that report that its authors deem most relevant to the materials science community. Awareness: Awareness is essential to create change. In this case, it’s the awareness of the challenges associated with developing and transitioning to healthier building materials. Among the many challenges is the lack of publicly available data: The majority of industrially available chemicals go unregulated, and, as such, there is limited hazard and exposure data available. To enable action in the face of such data limitations, the building industry’s transition to healthier materials relies on the precautionary principle. The principle states that we should refrain from using chemicals whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown. Fluency: The design community cannot be experts in chemical risk assessment, though that is the current expectation. This is avoidable, and chemists and materials scientists can help. The more chemists and materials scientists understand and consider health and environmental impacts during the design of both chemical processes and products, there is less need to mitigate them later. In turn, this reduces the architects’ need to assess and avoid hazardous materials in the design of buildings. A fundamental understanding of chemical hazard and risk is ess ential during the development of new chemical syntheses, and mate
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