Green Products Don’t Make It Green

By Matt Golden
A green house can be built with un-green products and an un-green house can be built with all green products. Its about process first, then products.

In our common vernacular, “green” has come to mean many things, and at the same time nothing at all. It has become the de-facto term for environmentally sound – dealing with everything from healthy living to energy consumption and global warming. Clever marketing has people choosing hair products and hybrid cars based on their green status.

Greenwashing 101
By watering down the term to mean expensive products, we promote the idea that we can buy our way to greenness without delivering real solutions to the environmental issues we face. This is greenwashing folks, and it has a very real potential to derail the positive effect of the green sector. We run the risk of alienating consumers as they become jaded by marketing claims that don’t represent reality.

When we really analyze the choices and products being offered by the green industry, it seems that we are starting at the wrong end of the spectrum. Almost everything that is fed to consumers turns out to be the most expensive and often the least effective measures.
Installing solar electric panels on a house will cut the coal we burn and lower the electric bill, but it’s not the best place to spend your money first. We’ve been building bigger, more power hungry homes for years; do we really think the answer lies in yet another big purchase?

What matters are results, not products
If we really want to reduce pollution, stop global warming, and minimize our dependence on fossil fuels, we need to be honest and clear about how we’re dealing with consumers’ wants and needs, and frame “green” by results.

Housing is a great place to start. There are more than 125 million existing homes in the United States. According to the US Energy Information Administration, these buildings represent 21% of the total US carbon footprint. Clearly, we can have an immediate environmental impact by improving the efficiency of these existing homes. Solar panels, hybrid cars, tankless water heaters, bamboo floors, and no-voc paints are great products, but when you approach a building as a system, you realize that individual products, no matter how high tech, can not replace proper fundamentals like tight duct work, good insulation, and weather stripping. By making smart improvements and working with the basics (which are often less expensive) we can make houses work properly so that they become healthy, comfortable and efficient – at a fraction of the cost.

We need to focus on solutions to people’s problems, whether it is energy costs or allergies. Once we have identified the core of each problem, we can address the real world issues and make a real difference when it comes to reducing the carbon footprint.

Tips to avoid greenwashing
As we in the green building world market our services and solutions, there are some clear guidelines we can follow to ensure we are not engaging in greenwashing.
Get the big picture - Understand all of the environmental impacts of your product across its entire lifecycle and share that information with your customers.
Be honest - Don’t overemphasize benefits to hide shortcomings.
Walk the talk - Keep improving your environmental footprint, and encourage your customers to join you on that journey.
Prove your point - Draw on respected standards and certification programs for legitimacy of environmental claims.

We are not lacking the technology to get the job done. The solution lies in helping consumers make smart choices, and thinking in terms of entire systems not simply the latest products.

Related article: The Six Sins of Greenwashing

--Matt Golden owns Sustainable Spaces in San Francisco, Calif

Life Cycle Assessment is a Tool, Not a Silver Bullet

Are steel studs greener than wood? Is plastic pipe greener than copper? And is vinyl siding green?

By Peter Yost

There are few green building topics that produce more frustration and uncertainty than claims about the environmental footprint of particular building materials. Life Cycle Assessments, such as the ones listed below, seem like the perfect tool for summing it all up, but Life Cycle Assessments fall short for many reasons.

Getting reliable data is difficult at best
A life cycle assessment starts with a life cycle inventory. This means identifying and quantifying the inputs and outputs of a product from “cradle to grave” (mining, manufacturing, moving, installing, service life, and disposing of). This is no small task. And because much of the information comes from product manufacturers, the data can be incomplete -- manufacturers may not have all of the information or they may be unwilling to share it. When all products in a Life Cycle Assessment database are not scrutinized equally, conclusions drawn from the information may be misleading.

You can’t predict how many people will actually get cancer, only that a product could cause it
After the life cycle inventory is put together, it must be translated it into actual environmental impacts: global warming, human toxicity, ozone depletion, rainforest degradation, etc. This is called life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), and it gets pretty hypothetical. Many of these environmental effects require assumptions, such as how many lives will be lost from a particular cancer-causing output. These assumptions are impossible for normal people to evaluate, so we have to rely on someone else’s professional judgment.

They make apples to oranges environmental comparisons
The environmental impacts associated with a product are wide-ranging and measured in many different ways. For example, biodiversity may be gauged by the number of species going extinct and global warming by world-wide temperature rise. But how do we compare the two in relative importance? Again, it’s hard for normal people to evaluate the relative importance, so we must rely on trustworthy experts to weight each impact category in essentially an “apples to oranges” process. Is ozone depletion twice as important as the acidification of lakes? Pick your poison.

Setting boundary conditions is subjective and fuzzy
In any analysis, deciding what is on the table and what is out of bounds or beyond the scope is an essential first step. What does this mean in environmental life cycle assessment of building products? Three vexing examples provide valuable insight:

• Open cell spray foam appears very green -- it insulates and air seals, it has no VOC off-gassing, uses water as the blowing agent, and it has proven to quite durable. But when considered in the greater context of a building, its excellent adhesion makes recycling or reusing the wood to which it is stuck difficult or even impossible. Should the insulation/air sealing properties be evaluated alone or should the effect on other building materials be considered?
• Burning PVC is very bad -- when burned in uncontrolled conditions, PVC creates a serious environmental hazard. But if PVC waste from construction is rarely involved in uncontrolled burning, should this issue be included in the environmental profile of PVC plumbing pipe? Should burning be included in other PVC products, but not those used in construction?
• Environmental regulations in other countries are often more lax that ours: A global manufacturer of paints has a good record of environmental compliance in the US, but a lousy record in countries with lax environmental standards. Do we consider the environmental degradation in other countries if we know the paint we are using is produced in the US?

Life Cycle Assessment is not a waste of time
Does this mean that Life Cycle Assessments and trying to compare the environmental profiles of competing products is a complete waste of time? Does it really matter which products we use from an environmental standpoint? The answer is that the environmental footprint of a product matters, but It should be put in the proper context:

• Product selection should be among the last of the green building priorities. The energy efficiency, water efficiency, durability, and safety to human health of the building should be the top priorities.
• Use building products manufactured and/or assembled locally and optimize the use of all construction materials (use fewer studs, design in 2 ft. modules, etc.).
  For the more complex LCA issues, go with product recommendations from a 3rd party, transparent, expert-based system such as TK.

Dive deeper:
Life Cycle Assessment for Buildings: Seeking the Holy Grail
Environmental Building News, March 2002.
Life Cycle 101
US EPA Life Cycle Assessment Research

Life Cycle Assessment tools:

• A Sampling of LCA Tools (sidebar to the above EBN article)
• BEES -- Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability tool published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
• The Athena Institute Environmental Impact Estimator
• Pharos Material Evaluation tool

--Peter Yost is Residential Program Manager at GreenBuildingAdvisor.com