The company's decision came after a review of available data by the
Healthy Building Network indicated no health benefits regarding antimicrobial substances in building materials.
Most recently, ACA and other allied trades responded to a white paper published by Perkins+Will and the
Healthy Building Network entitled, "Healthy Environments: Understanding Antimicrobial Ingredients in Building Materials." In the paper, the architectural firm placed building products marketed as "antimicrobial" on its precautionary list and urged its clients to avoid them whenever possible.
Flux, a San Jose-based technology company founded to deliver collaboration tools for increasing efficiencies in building architecture and engineering, has teamed with Google, a global tech company committed to creating healthy and sustainable workplaces;
Healthy Building Network (HBN), a nonprofit devoted to reducing toxic building materials; and, thinkstep, a global sustainability software, data and services firm, to launch the Quartz database.
The
Healthy Building Network (www.healthybuilding.net) lists "top downloads" on its site for background information on vinyl, perfluorinated compounds, bisphenol A, formaldehyde, and more.
The report recommends the Pharos Project (www.pharosproject.net), established by the U.S.-based
Healthy Building Network. It helps identify materials that do not harm the environment or human health by screening materials and ranking them according to their impacts.
"Bioplastics hold great promise for moving us away from dependence on plastics made from oil and gas;' says Tom Lent, technical policy coordinator for the
Healthy Building Network. "But while we're growing the feedstock unsustainably, bioplastics are still depleting oil and soil and adding lots of toxics to boot.
Finding the right recycled products for your construction project just got easier, thanks to a new classification system from the
Healthy Building Network (HBN).
CPSC is also considering a petition by the Environmental Working Group and the
Healthy Building Network to ban CCA-treated wood (5) in playground equipment.
Also last year, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the
Healthy Building Network, both consumer advocacy groups, produced a report on the risks to children from CCA-treated playground equipment.
As part of its campaign to have the arsenic removed from pressure-treated wood, the
Healthy Building Network (HBN) produced a full-page advertisement, also in conjunction with Fenton Communications.
Before the announcement, Healthy Building News, a publication of the
Healthy Building Network, reported in their Winter 2002 issue that the market for CCA alternatives was already "outpacing the regulatory process." The story quotes David Seitz, vice president of playground manufacturer PlayNation, as saying that just six months after offering wood treated with a CCA alternative, that alternative, despite costing 10% more, be came 80% of their sales.
"One thing is for sure, we have entered a new age of market transparency, and it has changed the conversation about building materials for good," writes Bill Walsh, founder and executive director of the
Healthy Building Network in a 2013 blog post.