The Health Product Declaration (HPD) Open Standard is a leading tool for reporting and disclosing the contents of building products and associated health information. Akin to, but more detailed and comprehensive than, a Safety Data Sheet (SDS), the HPD helps architects and building design teams make informed choices and avoid inherent chemical hazards. By providing for a single reporting standard that is open for everyone to use, it also reduces the burden for manufacturers, who to date have been fielding a host of unique requests from designers regarding the composition of their products.

 

As of November 1, design teams pursuing LEED certification for their new buildings will register them under LEEDv4, which rewards (but doesn’t mandate) selecting products whose manufacturers have publicly available HPDs. HPDs are also recognized in Google’s Healthy Materials Program’s Portico database, in the DELOS WELL Building Feature 97, and other similar tools.

 

The HPD initiative is managed and supported by the HPD Collaborative (HPDC), a nonprofit member organization representing a broad cross-section of building industry participants. HPDC collaborates with organizations such as Clean Production Action, Healthy Building Network, the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), and the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute (C2CPII). HPD reports can feed into Google’s Portico tool and Cradle to Cradle assessments, and can also provide inventory to support ILFI’s Declare labels.

 

Completing an HPD is the first step in subsequent product assessment and optimization efforts. The long-term goal is to spur building owners and designers to work with manufacturers to help our industry develop more products, and to know more about the materials used in the products they specify. As they become more informed, product specifiers and buyers will be better able to find products with reduced chemical footprints that have equal or better performance. Witness PROSOCO, the waterproofing manufacturer, which developed phthalate-free coatings first for the Bullitt Center in Seattle, a Living Building Challenge project, and has gone on to make this safer formulation standard in its product lines...