Allsteel’s Commitment to Healthy Interiors and Sustainable Practices
Lydia Neeley Tolander is the Senior Product Portfolio Manager at Allsteel. Following advocacy efforts made by the project team for the Stanely Center for Peace and Security, Allsteel began its journey into material health and transparency, getting its first two Declare labels in 2023. After discovering PVC, a Red List ingredient, in one of their components, Lydia’s team worked to reformulate and test changes to their products, ensuring that they met the needs of the project team while also being healthy for the building’s environment.
Lydia and her team’s journey through the removal of a Red List ingredient showcases Allsteel’s dedication to healthier, transparent material safety. Their efforts in identifying, disclosing, and addressing all ingredients within their products serve as a testament to the positive impact pursuing Declare can lead to.
What made you decide to remove PVC from your product lines and how did you make a business case for it?
At Allsteel, we’re focusing our commitment to sustainability by building a better portfolio with better impact that can create a better experience. This includes understanding and minimizing the impact that our products have on both the users of those products as well as the environment.
In 2022, Allsteel Beyond® architectural walls were installed throughout the new headquarters building for the Stanley Center for Peace and Security. The Stanley Center brings together people from across countries, cultures, and sectors to create dialogue and drive policy for mitigating climate change, avoiding the use of nuclear weapons, and preventing mass violence and atrocities.
The Living Building Challenge was adopted to guide the center’s workplace design efforts and this space ultimately became one of only four buildings at the time to achieve full Living Building Challenge certification through the renovation of an existing building. Through our team’s partnership and participation in this journey, providing the necessary chemical disclosures for our product in this space, we were inspired to start the journey to meet the transparency needs to obtain a Declare label for our entire architectural products portfolio. We felt this disclosure and concept of total chemical material transparency aligned closely with our brand, values, and corporate-level goals.
This was a fairly lengthy process and involved significant cooperation from our network of supply partners. While evaluating one model, we identified a foam gasket tape used to minimize light and sound transmission, where our supplier was unable to provide the chemical composition. As a result, we sent a sample of this tape to Iowa State University to have the material analyzed to determine the composition. The findings indicated that this foam tape was PVC, something we were not aware of. With its status as a Red List chemical, it was immediately evident to the team that we needed to find a suitable replacement for this part as it did not align with our commitments.
Our architectural products series consist of demountable walls that are oftentimes a replacement for conventional construction—an industry that produces a great deal of waste, dust, and other by-products that can be harmful to humans and the environment. For us, this creates an opportunity to innovate and do better.
Can you tell me about the process you used to remove the Red List ingredient from the product lines?
Upon discovering that PVC was present in the gasket tape, we quickly deployed resources to investigate and identify a suitable replacement. Our product engineering team worked in conjunction with internal materials experts and our supply chain team to find a tape that would meet the same functional and performance expectations as the existing gasket tape.
Our engineering team started by gathering the customer requirements for the current version of the foam tape, such as visual aesthetic, size/shape, and compressibility. They then passed that information along to our internal procurement team and our external vendor partners with requests to find a material that met those requirements while also meeting the preferred material makeup requirement. These teams connected with primary manufacturers of such materials who in turn provided us with recommendations and samples to review.
With samples in hand, we performed fit and function testing and evaluated the options made available to us. We essentially validated that the function was equal to or better than the function of the previous material in our applications of the new material. This was a team effort over about a day, involving simple installation, some reviews, and approvals. Once alternatives were identified, the team completed the necessary application testing and eventually selected the replacement.
Overall, the time commitment was a few weeks of work spread over a few months, with phone calls and meetings as needed every few weeks to stay aligned. Transportation and lead time of materials were big factors. Once we had determined the path forward, time to complete the material transition was also significant to avoid throwing away inventory of the old tape – we wanted to transition out of it as quickly as possible but also wanted to minimize the amount of waste we were creating in the process.
We first identified that the foam tape contained PVC in September 2023 and started immediately working with procurement. We had tested, selected, and finalized our replacement by December 2023, ran down our Aspect inventory by March 2024 and transitioned for that product category, and finally ran down our Beyond inventory in June 2024 to transition completely away from using that material within our product portfolio. We updated our bill of materials structure for all applicable Allsteel Aspect™ and Beyond® models to use the newly identified replacement in lieu of the previous tape.
What do you anticipate will be the impacts on your business and your consumers after removing the Red List ingredient from the product lines?
Our architectural products series consist of demountable walls that are oftentimes a replacement for conventional construction—an industry that produces a great deal of waste, dust, and other by-products that can be harmful to humans and the environment. For us, this creates an opportunity to innovate and do better. Our products physically surround our clients and their employees via the built environment and as a result, it’s our commitment to continuously re-evaluate our offering to ensure it meets the highest standards supporting human and environmental health.
We find that this commitment aligns with many of our clients’ values, goals, and vision that they have for their workplace and makes it easy to continue to invest in our product solutions. Because sustainability doesn’t have an endpoint, removing PVC from our architectural products portfolio was just one step in our ongoing journey to be better than the day before.
The desire to be part of something that exemplifies the positive impact people can make has led to coordinated efforts for the greater good. Collaboration among materials experts, project managers, various segments of the supply chain, and numerous internal and external teams resulted in the removal of a hazardous ingredient—PVC. This commitment to continuous improvement aligns with the values of our clients. Doing good not only has a moral benefit but also meets the increasing demand from clients for products that are healthy and sustainable.
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