ASBP LONG READ ARTICLE
The Alliance for Sustainable Building Products (ASBP) and the Healthy Materials Lab (HML) have for some time recognised the synergies between their organisations. In June 2025, ASBP CEO Simon Corbey and HML Co-Founder Alison Mears agreed that the organisations should form a collaborative partnership to work more closely together.
There are many similarities between the objectives of the two organisations, not least the focus on creating healthier built environments by advocating for non-toxic, sustainable materials. The HML advocates for the implementation of healthy materials practices industry wide from education all the way through to manufacturing and policy and then to work with our small team in New York and Germany to move projects forward; and the mission of the ASBP is about how they can work with their members and the wider industry to move towards a low carbon and healthy built environment through research, advocacy and sharing knowledge and best practice.
As a precursor to the collaboration announcement, and as a way to introduce each organisation to the others network, ASBP Director Debbie Ward facilitated a conversation with Simon and Alison. The conversation was wide ranging, covering topics such as nature-based solutions, the link between healthy buildings and healthier people, the importance of good indoor air quality, materials libraries, transparent and good quality data sharing, timber construction, and how regulation and policy can drive change.
ARTICLE CONTENTS
- Healthy buildings = healthier people
- Sources of information about materials
- Indoor air quality
- Regulation and policy
- Timber
- Data and transparency
- Driving action – bottom up or top down?
Healthy buildings = healthier people
Fundamental to both organisations is that indoor environments should be free from toxic materials and based around the use of nature-based solutions. A particular focus for HML is that there should be equity in healthy environments and that safe materials and a healthy home should be accessible to everyone. Equally whilst a good proportion of the work the ASBP is involved with is around carbon emissions and the circular economy, they also have a much broader agenda that covers health and well-being, including trying to keep it is as high up the agenda as net zero/low carbon, one should not be talked about in isolation of the other.
There was avid agreement that healthy homes equals healthy people, which in the UK further equates to much less of a health burden on the NHS. Simon felt that quite often that element of the debate isn’t well heard within UK government, where growth and targets for new build are the prime focus but the health and well-being aspects are very secondary. As such the ASBP are keen to get involved in more research projects around health and wellbeing and support the industry to bring it more to the forefront in decision making around design and material specification.
The construction sector needs to further explore and better understand the connection between low carbon and healthy buildings, including the removal of toxic chemicals such as PVC, PFAS and phthalates, and ensuring formaldehyde is kept at safe levels; chemicals which unfortunately are contained in many standard building products. Alison underlined the importance of taking a systems approach to buildings and really interrogating the whole life cycle of products, looking at low embodied carbon, the capacity to regenerate, the ability to reuse, and understanding how manufacturers are making products.
How can healthier products be made more readily available? With the reduction of synthetic toxic chemicals, to the point where buildings can be built just with healthy materials. How do we get from here to there? To a green sustainable ecosystem where we are moving towards a petrochemical free world.
To date we have been talking about reducing energy produced from fossil fuels but we should also be talking about of the petrochemical content of the products we use. How can we reduce that petrochemical content and replace it with other nature based systems that meet the performance and maintenance criteria of what we set forth? HML have been focussing from the perspective of the individual outwards. From a healthy family to the neighbourhood to the community, the city and then to a healthy world.
Sources of information about materials
HML does their own independent vetting of all of the products that they put into their materials collections. They have their own materials library, a physical library in New York with samples from materials being used in industry all the way through to products that are at various stages of the innovation cycle and an online materials database with around 200,000 visitors a year. Their team looks at the production of a product as well the content before it’s completely vetted and approved, and goes on their list. HML requires a seventy five to eighty percent ingredient disclosure from the manufacturers, and that often requires NDA’s with a number of organisations.
HML’s materials library, as with the EPD database on the ASBP’s website, is designed to support design teams to make more sustainable specification choices. Where a time poor architect might be specifying flooring and they know that they don’t want to specify vinyl and are not sure about alternatives – what do they do? They can access these resources in that moment to be able to specify a better product without having to do the five or up to twenty hours of materials researching and vetting themselves.
Indoor air quality
The WELL building standard came up in a recent meeting Simon had with a fit out company, and he was pleasantly surprised how integral it was to their day to day thinking. The ASBP like the WELL building standard because you have to do post occupancy evaluation and then monitoring, including indoor air quality monitoring. It has always struck Simon as being quite expensive though which he feels has put a lot of people off. There is no doubt though that the blue chip companies really understand that happy and healthy staff equals productive staff that stay in the job longer and that’s an easy message to get across.
Alison agreed, HML has done some interior air quality testing, and anything beyond basic tests such as VOC is incredibly expensive. They conducted testing it on a small renovation, an adaptive reuse of a wood frame house with a hemp lime and interior plaster and exterior wood rain screen and then looked at all of the interior products really carefully to make them as benign as possible. Then they had a control house – a contemporary built with no low energy requirements or chemical criteria and compared the two. They did really simple testing including formaldehyde – the formaldehyde content was reduced by four hundred percent compared to the control but it cost them $30,000 to do the initial testing for these two small houses and do the evaluation and then give them the report. These costs are prohibitive for many, and when you’re looking for evidence of whether you’re actually progressing in the toxic space it’s actually quite difficult to do.
Alison continued on to say that the WELL standard is comprehensive from the choice of your building products, the installation protocols, the ‘no materials substitutions’, to closeout. There are also recommendations for the occupancy phase, which includes cleaning materials recommendations and a stewardship of the building going forward, so it’s not as simple as materials choices.
Regulation and policy
The topic switched over to regulation and policy and how that impacts on materials. Alison stated that the regulation of chemical use hasn’t been high on the agenda for any federal government in the US. A level of chemical regulation became law in 1975 (the Toxic Substances Control Act or TSCA) it partially regulated two hundred chemicals of the eighty-five thousand chemicals in current usage and partially banned the use of the five worst chemicals including lead and PCBs. There’s never been a requirement to declare the ingredients of any of the common products, so architects have to go directly to manufacturers to get ingredient information.
Individual states in the US can be more powerful, so states like California have been much better at introducing chemical policy and regulation for products that are manufactured in their area. If somewhere like California sets policy – it’s purportedly the fifth biggest economy in the world – then it impacts the rest of the country. HML has in the past given advice as academics to government but they are moving more into a consultancy role to work more closely with local government organisations as well as private sector companies.
When the ASBP first launched back in 2011 conversations about low carbon and healthy materials were few and far between. Moving forward 14 years to 2025 and it’s much more mainstream, ASBP’s message has remained very similar but thankfully the industry has started to catch up and place at least the reduction of carbon emissions amongst board level priorities. The health and wellbeing aspect has definitely risen up the agenda too but not to the level of carbon.
The ASBP obviously has the Reuse Now campaign as one of its initiatives, but what will really drive the reclamation for reuse and the reuse of materials is legislation around embodied carbon.
The ASBP is fully supportive of Part Z, which is a proof of concept that has been created by and in conjunction with the construction industry and has been set out to look like a building regulation. Part Z would ensure that embodied carbon is assessed on all projects, as part of a comprehensive whole life carbon assessment. Simon talked about the ASBP having a renewed push with their members and membership organizations within their networks, asking everybody to sign up. Hopefully by getting thousands of signatories, the industry can show the government that there is a there is a willingness and a sense of scale behind these asks. As part of the ASBP’s advocacy role they have reached out more to government in recent years inviting them along to conferences and feeding industry views, research and knowledge back to support decision making and endeavour to drive positive change around the low carbon, healthy buildings agenda.
Timber
The conversation was then steered towards an initiative that the ASBP has been working quite closely with the insurance industry on, mass timber. Simon outlined that insurance has been one of the major barriers of mass timber buildings and that the barrier seems to be gradually increasing in Europe. It seems that there is little understanding and no legislation or regulation around toxicity and fire and we really need to explore this much more. As we are trying to understand all the lessons from Grenfell it is not just about the cladding, certainly the windows were seen as a soft entry point for fires from the outside moving inside, but in addition to how the fire spread there is also that people died of smoke asphyxiation rather than the fire itself, and the long term impacts on the firefighters that attended the incident, so there is a lot there to be analysed.
Simon mentioned the work of Professor Anna Stec, who has worked with the fire brigade to do research into toxic contaminants in fires.
The report found that toxic contaminants in fires are directly linked to increased rates of cancer and mental health issues among firefighters, with instances of cancer among firefighters aged 35-39 up to 323% higher than in the general population in the same age category.
1 in 4 Grenfell firefighters surveyed have reported life changing health effects since, including 66 cases of digestive diseases, 64 respiratory diseases, 22 neurological diseases and 11 cancers. Professor Stec is now involved in a health monitoring program to include regular health check-ups and monitoring for cancers and other diseases and identify any potential health issues related to firefighters’ job.
Following this Alison recommended the film Toxic Hot Seat about the chemical industry, fire and the impact of contemporary building products on the health of firefighters. Within the first six months of the launch of HML the team talked to a local fire chief, and he told this incredible story about what it’s like to be in a modern building in the midst of a fire and how everything is on fire. All of the products that are making up that space suddenly transform from their solid state into being on fire and melting, creating toxic fumes as a consequence. Additionally he said that because the windows now are so well built the glass doesn’t break as it used to due heat from the fire, and so the impact of that is that the space is even hotter than it would be if the windows blew out. As the temperature rises all of those products burn, releasing the toxins within them into the air or even transitioning to become tiny airborne fragments, and the fire fighters are exposed to them constantly. Firefighters have a high rate of cancers and other diseases as a result of their workplace exposure. We need to be conscious of not only thinking about fire in terms of our own safety but also about the people who are trying to keep us safe, and that we are potentially exposing them to all of these incredibly toxic chemicals should they come into our buildings in the event of a fire.
Simon met with the Fire Service Research and Training Trust in June, to look at a research project about Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) and how particularly the screws fixing the trays that carry all the services conduct heat quite quickly, get very hot and can pull out. This creates the possibility of entanglement, and so he is looking to conduct a piece of research there, and is also keen to have broader discussions with them and explore other areas.
CLT, given it’s a kind of quasi biobased material… does Simon not think it can be a ‘problem’ material – mused Alison – thinking about the percentage of glue that’s in there as opposed to the percentage of wood, could it be problematic in terms of shedding over time and the glue being exposed, which is also probably the more flammable part of the assembly. Could this not make the case for moving to purely bio or earth based products – particularly looking at it through the lens of fire?
Whilst Simon doesn’t feel that is so much of an issue, he does add that, with the Grenfell report now being the go to reference on fire, there has been a considerable kickback on using combustible products. This has brought all sorts of consequences regarding timber and other bio-based products – even though there were no bio-based products in the building structure. So at the moment you cannot build timber framed social housing house in London because the mayor was very concerned that timber was classed as a combustible material – so we have this unfortunate position, alongside the fact that regulations around the use of CLT at scale are very complex.
Conversely in the US, Alison mentioned that in New York state the building code has been adjusted to be able to build with CLT to six or seven stories. That has come about through the CLT industry being active and effective lobbyists, they did a good job during the fire testing and really making the case for the size of the member. They ensured people understood that it wasn’t not at all like wood burning in a fireplace, but is about the physical characteristics of the structure that make it much more difficult to burn.
HML is currently working with a group of foresters in Vermont looking at more effective uses of their forest. They have five thousand acres of forests and a group of smaller forestry owners and producers, and looking for opportunities to rethink the way we use wood – non standard species and non standard dimensional systems, all very interesting although at small scale in terms of how we could more efficiently, sustainably and resiliently use our forests and still create wood for construction
The ASBP works closely with Woodknowledge Wales (WKW) on various wood related projects, this sounds very similar to some of the work they have been championing. Simon went on to say that WKW are now working with a group of twenty or so social housing providers to create a pattern book for social housing. The idea is that all the timber framers will have access to the same pattern book which in principle should improve quality and drive down cost. The team has also been looking at the biogenic carbon aspect of the project which will soon be published.
Data and transparency
Debbie moved the subject on to data, more specifically digital product passports and EPD, from a data perspective the industry has both voluntary and potentially regulatory demands for more data, both in terms of reporting and in terms of transparency and traceability of materials. Obviously just by having an EPD doesn’t equal a sustainable, low carbon, healthy product but it enables that transparency if people know what they’re looking at – which can be another issue, you need to know what you are looking at/ looking for.
Alison interjected to say that it is about the accuracy and currency of the data. California is doing some good work around setting global warming potential limits for products and requiring EPDs for products as well so that is positive. It’s an indicator for the rest of the US that California is at least starting to measure embodied carbon. The US is nowhere near rolling out regulations for materials passports though it is being investigated by architects interested in circularity. There is also a movement to adaptively reuse buildings which is the better option as we go forward. California, even in the current climate, is at least advancing the EPD movement and setting some kind of baselines.
It’s interesting, added Debbie, that organisations that trade globally are having to pick the highest denominator and then set all their product standards to that, because it’s actually more efficient and effective to do that than try and create different products for different countries. So even as Alison says federally and there isn’t really that level of regulation if California as a very big market is setting that regulation then it is hopefully pushing everything up.
Driving action – bottom up or top down?
In a similar vein Debbie asked Simon and Alison a final question about what they felt were effective techniques and strategies to try to drive change whether it should be bottom up action by the market, by the manufacturers, by the clients or top down through policy and regulation? Or indeed what combination of the two?
Alison mentioned two particularly noteworthy biobased materials manufacturers, Hempitecture and Hemp Wood. Hempitecture was started by two young guys in 2019 a year after the 2018 Farm Act in the US when industrial hemp was able to be grown legally in the US, and they’ve grown their business making a broad range of hemp fibre based insulation products and board products, starting with the insulation. They now have five outlets for distribution across the country producing in Idaho, and introducing a product into the market that is as easily installed comparable to a fiberglass bat. So she feels their penetration in the market is noteworthy because they’ve taken something from innovation all the way through to quite rapid distribution, and doing a great job of it. The Hemp Wood team have started production in the EU now as well, so they started as a small company in the North East but they’ve got a number of products that are also hemp fibre based products with a bio based, soy based glue as the binding component, and looking at board products as well as flooring.. They are showing that it’s possible to do this kind of work and also be incorporated into contemporary construction practice.
And there is a swathe of people coming up behind them that are also starting to bring products to market. Ecococon is now producing in the state of New York and their panelised product is also really easy to incorporate into contemporary US construction practices. We can see that it’s possible now and that it’s scalable rather than a one off. For Alison it’s the market seeing an opportunity and also that consumers are interested in the health aspect, particularly mid to high range consumers, and they are demanding a healthier building. So there is a market for these products, for HML it feels like the manufacturers are potentially the biggest drivers at the moment for change in the US, and then architects who are always interested in new products. Albeit that they need the products to fit their needs and to be available, and that the contractor can buy that product quickly and install it on site, so the supply piece is incredibly important for the US because it has been difficult to source truly sustainable products.
From a UK market perspective, Simon picks up, it’s a combination of bottom up action by industry and regulation coming top down, it’s got to be both hasn’t it really – a mixture of carrot and stick. But we need more developers involved and leading, Greencore Homes who build higher end domestic developments is one example, they use a hemp structural insulated panel system. And then on a larger scale, the ASBP are working with Human Nature who are looking at a full scale city wide redevelopment which they want to be all timber and biobased products. They are just about to get detailed planning for phase one which is in Lewes near Brighton. It’s a new model, an open book process and an exciting way of being a developer. We can all see that developers are starting to invest or show a lot of interest in building timber frame, and moving away from brick and block so there’s a lot of really positive things going on.
Lastly if Simon and Alison could wave a magic wand what one thing would they change or put in place to support a more rapid transition to a healthy low carbon built environment?
Alison’s wish would be to create really stringent chemical regulations and have it implemented tomorrow, which would resolve a lot of problems. It would give manufacturers clear guidelines and it would go a huge way to enable everyone to live in healthy housing. Simon totally agreed saying yes we’ll have one of those here too please!