The use of sustainable building products has been a subject of interest to me personally and to SpecifiedBy as a company, for quite a while.

Our goal has always been to help architects, designers, specifiers and many other AECO professionals to make informed decisions about building products and materials, by providing well-structured, open data for over 15,000 products available in the UK.

So we believe there is an opportunity for our platform to also help specifiers to make better, more sustainable product choices, and to do this more efficiently, through better access to the necessary information.

But we need help to do this.

Through various events, partnerships, recommendations and policy, the ASBP’s remit is to educate, inform and encourage the use of demonstrably sustainable and responsible building products and materials in the UK.

We believe that working alongside the ASBP will help us to realise a vision of making sustainable product choices easy for the mainstream market, not just those actively seeking out ‘green’ and sustainable products.

This is not about labelling products as ‘green’ and ‘not green’, which has been the general approach to date. This is about giving designers the tools and information they need to effectively assess and make sound decisions.

Challenges / Problems

Sustainability is really tough.

There are so many variables to consider, but even before we get to the issues with understanding sustainable criteria or specifying and correctly using sustainable building products, we’ve got a big issue with just getting hold of the necessary information.

There’s this huge problem in the construction industry generally, where the majority of our information is still analogue.

So in the example of building products, all of this data about technical performance, dimensions, and importantly, sustainable criteria, is generally locked up in PDFs and Word documents, making it very time-consuming to extract and make use of.

The information we need does exist in the form of datasheets, certifications, details, brochures etc. but it is dumb; it can’t be interrogated, analysed or used in any simple way.

Until this is addressed, the access, understanding and consideration of sustainable criteria will only be done by those most dedicated or incentivised to do so.

This is greatly limiting the use and impact of sustainable products.

Transparency

As mentioned earlier this is not about trying to label a product against a rigid set of criteria.

The criteria for a sustainable product changes greatly from product to product, client to client and project to project.

So we believe that the simplest starting point is transparency.

The ASBP website states:

“We believe that robust change is best delivered through informed choice rather than coercion.”

And we couldn’t agree more. Combined with education, the most important step is simply about making the necessary information accessible and understandable.

For quite a while now, SpecifiedBy has been extracting data (manually and using technology) from building product literature and structuring it into standardised datasets.

By doing this, and by making this data open and accessible for everyone, we’ve been able to provide advanced search and comparison for the technical properties of building products; but we believe, with the support of organisations such as the ASBP, we can take this even further.

So this is not a new process for us but by better understanding and focusing on sustainable criteria, we believe we can help educate, improve decision making and hopefully stimulate the more frequent use of sustainably responsible products and materials.

This starts by taking all of the information currently locked up in various certifications and eco label documents such as NaturePlus, and creating structured data sets from these; we want to democratise this information and work with others to help educate on its meaning.

The consideration of sustainable criteria does not, and should not, only be for those who have dedicated themselves to using sustainable products.

It should be a consideration for all.

Assessing and comparing sustainable criteria, and using this as part of the product selection process, should be so simple, that doing so becomes engrained — the norm.

The selection of products and materials impacts the building and its occupants for years to come. This is a huge responsibility for any architect, specifier or construction team, and one they deserve some help with.

We hope to play our part.