SPECIALFEATURE
Developers believed
specifications and projects. Although only a few dozen of these “Do this or else!” letters have been sent by fewer than 10 architecture firms, they have grabbed the attention of the unlucky recipients. WHAT ARE HPDS AND WHERE DID THEY COME FROM? The Health Product Declaration Standard was developed by a small group of architects and manufacturers named the Health Product Declaration Collaborative. It was created to be the industry standard format for conveying details about product content and associated health information.” Its developers believed that HPDs would allow designers to “specify products with full knowledge of what’s in them and how they will impact a buildings environment and occupants.” As I discovered after digging into one of the few HPDs I could find, this could not be further from the truth.
that HPDs would allow designers to “specify products with full knowledge of what’s in them and how they will impact a buildings environment
BREAKING DOWN AN HPD Each of the manufacturers involved in the development of HPD standard reportedly provided all necessary information for a product (or products) during a pilot stage of the standard’s development, an exercise that was to culminate with a collection of actual HPDs. But you will not find these HPDs on the collaborative’s Web site. Nor will you find them at each of the participating manufacturers’ Web sites. I could find only one. It turns out that one HPD is more than enough to illustrate the utter fantasy contained in the belief that an evaluation of a HPD will do anything to make a building greener or occupants safer. 50
and occupants.” The HPD I found is for wall protection specialties such as crash rails, corner guards and wall coverings. Only two ingredients are listed in the HPD; a corn-based plastic called polyactide (PLA) and a flame retardant called melamine polyphosphate. Both ingredients are reported as having, “No warnings found on HPD priority lists.” The HPD priority lists are a collection of roughly 30 “red lists” of chemicals of concern including governmental and nongovernmental, all of them referred to as “authoritative” on the HPD collaborative Web site. In the hands of a designer that trusts that the HPD is what its developers claim it to be, this manufacturer’s HPD declares the products sustainable and healthy, no warnings found – specify with abandon! DIGGING A LITTLE DEEPER On a whim, just to see what happened, I did an internet search for “polyactide resin” and was surprised to get a laundry list of results that paints an entirely different picture
Summer 2014 | Acoustical INTERIOR CONSTRUCTION
portrayed by the HPD. I learned from an article on about.com that PLA is typically made from genetically modified corn, the largest producer of PLA in the world being the world’s largest provider of genetically modified corn seed, and that the future costs of genetic modification to the environment and human health are still largely unknown and could be very high. I also learned from an exhaustive Life-Cycle Analysis on PLA done by the Athena Institute in 2006 that:
• PLA degrades only with diffi-
culty, and will not degrade in a home composting project, which means reliance on a commercial operation, of which few exist in the United States. Claims about the biodegradability benefits of bio-based plastics are in the realm of conjecture.
• If PLA is incinerated, the same
results could be expected as for conventional plastics.
• PLA production requires con-
siderations such as the possible requirement for more water on the use of ancillary materials such as nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides to grow corn as compared to many other crops.
• While conventional plastics can
be recycled, PLA cannot be mixed with other plastics for recycling. In fact, if PLA plastic is mixed with PET plastic, the potential to harm the existing extensive PET recycling infrastructure is likely because of the