Choose Your Own Materials Adventure—But Use the Same Map
By Alexandra Muller
The task of choosing sustainable materials as a designer can often feel like an intrepid journey. The impact of our decisions ripple throughout time and space, yet we’ve had no clear goal, or consistent map to guide our actions.
Difficulties to document the impacts of materials, build awareness, and establish standards for transparency and reduction have abounded in recent decades. Today, though, we’re here to talk about why an act as simple as alignment could be your most transformative action.
mindful MATERIALS makes the case for treating the AIA Architecture & Design Materials Pledge as our guiding North Star, and the new Common Materials Framework as the central map we all use to guide and inform our unique journeys. Together, these tools provide the foundation for broad industry alignment (and future benchmarking), by answering the questions “Where are we headed?” and “How do we know when we’re getting there?”
Where Are We Headed? The Pledge
Before pledges, product sustainability was a variable definition and firm-specific demand. First released in 2019, the AIA Architecture & Design Materials Pledge changed this paradigm, by allowing all A&D to come together around a broad vision for sustainability — defining the ‘North’ Star of product sustainability as materials that support climate health, human heath, circularity, social health, and equity within a circular economy. We call them the ‘5 buckets’ of sustainability.
Since its release, more than 170 signatures have been added. These include every size and type of firm, and multiple other stakeholder groups have followed suit, releasing pledges for manufacturers, specifiers, engineers, owners and beyond — committing to those same north stars.
If you think your signature doesn’t matter, we humbly disagree.
Your signature establishes you as a leader, shoulder to shoulder with firms of all types and sizes and alongside other stakeholder groups setting out similar commitments; building a signal too powerful to ignore and feeding a public body of knowledge that makes this work easier and more feasible for everyone. Your signature is just as powerful as the one that preceded it, and those that follow.
This work is impossible alone. The only way forward is together. Add your voice.
Are We There Yet? The Common Materials Framework
Let’s imagine you’ve already signed the Pledge (or you’re dipping your pen in ink now). Congratulations! Your signature is driving a better future by building aligned demand for products that support health holistically! So now you just…
*crickets*
…wait…what now? Where do we go from here? What does Social Health + Equity mean for products? Which certifications and standards prove reductions Climate impact? My coworker and I wouldn’t even define these buckets the same, let alone align with Owners and Manufacturers!
Don’t panic!
That’s why the mindful MATERIALS (mM) Common Materials Framework (CMF) exists. With multiple pledges in circulation and only words to define the ‘buckets’ - the mM community saw the danger of industry splintering if each pledge organizer creating their own bucket definitions and data points. mM leveraged its community of material experts to convene a powerful, cross-functional to build a framework that could be adopted by every company, platform and stakeholder.
The framework is a meta-analysis of all major material certifications and standards in the built environment. Its purpose is to identify all relevant sustainability factors and their benchmarks, and organize those factors within five buckets of sustainability. By unpacking and mapping that information to a common structure that can be used by any professional across the built environment, across multiple tools and databases, the framework drives consistency in decision-making and allows for benchmarking progress and success in improving the holistic health of our built environment and reducing the embodied impacts of buildings. Social Health and Equity means the same thing, no matter who’s tackling it.
Recently adopted by AIA as the backbone for pledge accountability, and following shortly by other pledge organizers, the CMF provides a pre-competitive point of alignment for all stakeholders. As detailed in this press release, the Framework will be digitized and integrated into the new mM Portal in fall 2022 to make its knowledge actionable, and ultimately connected across all major materials platforms.
For more information about the Common Materials Framework:
Join us at Greenbuild 2022 in the mM Pavilion and our events to learn more:
And if you haven’t joined the AIA Materials Pledge yet, do so here.
Pledges placed the North Stars in the sky for us to follow, but getting there is going to take all of us getting on the same page. So go ahead, choose your own materials adventure, but please — let’s use the same map.
Alexandra Muller is Vice President, Communications & Strategy, at Mindful Materials (mM).