Healthy Materials

Moore & Giles’ Path to Red List Free Beverly McAuley, the Senior Director of Sustainability and Education at Moore & Giles, has advocated for material health and transparency for years. Her passion for material safety led Moore & Giles to be the first leather company with a Declare label in 2017. And now, because of her efforts, they have over…

The Impact of Declare Labels Over the last few years as Declare has grown, material transparency has become the rule in sustainable building. The Living Building Challenge requires some Declare labeled products to be used in projects, LEED offers points to projects using Declare labeled products, and the Green Building Council of Australia recognizes Declare. As self-disclosure becomes more common…

At Living Future this year, in my hometown of Atlanta, I kicked off the conference by sharing 10 things that are on my mind. Here’s a recap. While you all are out there designing products, building buildings, doing innovative research, writing policy, I spend a lot of my time on movement strategy work, along with my colleagues and our co-conspirators….

Monmade Supports Product Pipelines In almost every sector and industry, especially as they are undergoing change, gaps in the flow are revealed. Monmade, a network of small manufacturers and makers in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, is an example of an organization that sprang to life to fill such a gap—to become the connective tissue in the material flows that…

A Path to a Better Future Recently I wrapped my first Ecotone project with my ILFI colleagues Michael Berrisford and Juliet Grable and their editorial team, and I am delighted to introduce the new book, The Regenerative Materials Movement (Ecotone, 2023). These dispatches about regenerative materials are a primer on the issues at play in our work.  Using the three…

How do you think about your work each day, and the work you are doing as part of this movement? As I consider the purpose of ILFI, I am conscious of a need for and a blossoming of innovation and advocacy. For many of us, I see that innovation comes more naturally and is a part of our work, but…

Could this be the Future of High-Quality Regenerative Housing? Imagine a housing solution that is not only affordable and prefabricated but also Core Green Building Certified. When you hear these terms, what thoughts and images come to mind? For one of the teams participating in the Affordable Housing Pilot Project by the International Living Future Institute, it signifies an incredible…

Materials transparency is one of the biggest trends shaping design right now. Whether to understand carbon emissions or hazardous chemicals, clients are demanding more information about the climate and health impacts of products they are choosing. For designers who are selecting flooring or any of the products used in building construction or renovation, the push for transparency could create a…

Affordable housing teams can now filter the Declare database based to find products that meet Enterprise Green Communities criteria.

Hey, Designers! You know when you’re in a meeting with a client and they ask, “Why does sustainability matter?” and you’re put on the spot and suddenly can’t remember anything, even your own name? Yeah, I’ve been there! I’ve heard many times that it would be helpful to have talking points in your back pocket for precisely that situation.  When…

After more than a decade working as a sustainability consultant specializing in materials, Lisa Carey Moore joined ILFI in August 2021 as its Manager, Products and Materials. In her first article for Trim Tab, she shares some recent sources of inspiration, and the reflection they caused, with the hope that it will provide you with the spark to recommit to…

Organizations like the Healthy Building Network (HBN), Housing Partnership Network (HPN), and the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) share a vision for safer and healthier housing and have each developed a set of resources that can be used to educate and to facilitate the selection of safer products. Though there are some differences in terminology and approach among these organizations…

In 2020, ILFI published the first version of the Materials List for Affordable Housing. In June of this year, we updated the list to include five additional product categories, for a total of twenty. The list includes products that have been used by past affordable housing teams, products in our Declare database, and products that were independently researched by ILFI…

Editor’s Note: Join us for the Affordable Housing Summit on June 17th, 2021! This year we are focusing on the residents and will talk about working with communities to build housing that improves the quality of life for the residents and for the broader neighborhood. We will dig in on topics like inclusive community engagement, trauma-informed design, biophilic design, healthy…

Editor’s note: We’re so honored to have an article contributed this month by one of our Sponsors, Armstrong Ceiling & Wall Solutions. You can learn more about them and their courage to pursue meaningful change in the article below, and you can also learn more about work like this and how you can make a difference, at this year’s Living…