Resources for Living Building Challenge Project Teams

Pursuing the Living Building Challenge is…well…a challenge. And it can be frustrating when you don’t have many examples to go off of, or resources to pull from. Here are some resources that William and I have created as we are continuing to pursue full Living Building Challenge certification with our home. Feel free to download the documents and alter them to meet your specific project! 

Manufacturer Inquiry Document

This document condenses all of the necessary information that the LBC requires per product/material that you wish to specify in your project. William and I created this document when I realized I was reading the Material Petal chapter in the Petal Handbook 3..4..5 times, and finding ‘new’ questions that I should’ve been asking manufacturers every time I re-read the chapter.

“You mean I was supposed to also be asking about whether the product meets CDPH Standard Method for VOC Emissions??”

I mean, it’s not like the Petal Handbook hides the information. I just got overwhelmed and my brain only took in so much new information at a time. And every time I re-read the chapter on material requirements, I ‘re-learned’ something new that I should’ve been doing the whole time as I vetted products. Well, I had enough of that. So, we condensed all of the information you would ever need to ask manufacturers onto one fillable form.

Below is a PDF of the Manufacturer Inquiry Document. Feel free to download and use the form for your own project. Or, you can use what we created as a template to help you design your own!

If downloading, we suggest filling in your own project name at the top, and project team contact information at the bottom of the form. We also suggest pre-marking questions that are not relevant to a specific product as “N/A” before sending to the manufacturer. That way, the document is more applicable to the specific product, and makes the form less intimidating for the manufacturer to fill out. 

For example, if the product you are looking to vet is exterior wood siding, then questions relating to VOCs, small electrical components, small mechanical components, or sustainable stone standards are irrelavant, and can therefore be marked as “Not Applicable.” You only need to know final assembly location, 100% of ingredients down to 100ppm (hopefully it’s just wood…), what can be done with the product at the end of its useful lifespan (helpful for embodied carbon assessment), do a bit of advocacy for a Declare Label, and inquire on the wood’s FSC status. Boom. Done.

Note! Developing a strong connection and relationship with manufacturers is helpful to engaging in real discussions on their products. Many manufactures want to do good, and they want their products to be good for both people and the planet. They just need someone like you to reach out to them 🙂

Sample Stone Industry Advocacy Letter

Below is a Stone Advocacy Letter that we sent to a quarry. Feel free to use it as a reference when writing your own letter when you need to advocate to stone suppliers to certify to ANSI/NSC 373 Sustainable Production of Natural Dimension Stone standards.

Sample Biophilic Design Workshop

The following document covers the requirements for Imperative 19~ Beauty & Biophilia. It covers how we went about planning our Biophilic Design Workshop(s), a review on how the Workshop(s) actually went, as well as our resulting Biophilic Framework and Biophilic Plan for our project. This document is technically still ‘in-progress’ on our part; we need to complete the Final Biophilic Framework (we will document this as our design & construction processes continue, and the framework adapts), as well as the Biophilic Results (we will complete this during occupancy phase). This document also includes images of materials we used to facilitate discussions and engage participants. Please feel free to download, and use the document as a reference when fulfilling the requirements of Imperative 19 for your own LBC and/or Core project!

Sample Toxnot Advocacy Letter

When pursuing the Material Petal of the Living Building Challenge, project teams aim to receive 100% disclosure of the ingredients in products they would like to specify…right down to the nitty gritty 100ppm threshold. When it comes to complex equipment composed of a variety of small parts from a number of various suppliers, it can understandably become difficult to receive 100% ingredient disclosure at 100ppm. When the product cannot be substituted within the project, and the manufacturer is unable to supply the required information, project teams hold the responsibility to advocate an Industry Standard Disclosure Program (or, Toxnot!!) to said manufacturers.

Toxnot is an incredible platform that helps manufacturers track down all that nitty gritty supply chain data. And then, Toxnot provides avenues for the manufacturers to disclose said data through a multitude of transparency programs (Declare, Health Product Declarations…).

Project teams! Feel free to download the file below and use it as an example when sending your Toxnot Advocacy letter.

Sample Embodied Carbon Project Baseline Documentation

Imperative 7, Energy and Carbon Reduction, requires documentation that shows the project’s embodied carbon count is less than the industry baseline. There are more intricacies and details that go into those parameters…but, first things first! In order to prove that our project is “better than the baseline,” we needed to find out what the “baseline” was in the first place. We received permission from ILFI to use my parents’ home as our baseline (roughly the same dimensions, same use/occupancy, even just about the same interior layout…). I took the characteristics of my parents’ home, and I input those characteristics into EC3’s embodied carbon calculator. EC3’s calculator is a free tool, and recommended by ILFI to use.

EC3 uses existing Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to generate an embodied carbon count per material, expressed in kilograms of embodied carbon (kgCO2e). For example, when I entered into the calculator that my parents used a ReadyMix Concrete (03 30 00 Cast-in-Place Concrete) that had a psi of 3,000 and was sourced from Pennsylvania, EC3 provided EPDs that met those parameters. Since an EPD did not exist for the manufacturer who supplied my parents’ concrete, I used the conservative embodied carbon estimate generated by EC3 for the parameters I provided (meaning, on average, not many EPDs with the given parameters will have a worse embodied carbon count).

I know…so many words. This was my first time creating an embodied carbon count for a building. I watched A LOT of tutorials. The best advice I can give to someone using EC3 for the first time, is to just jump in and learn from doing. Also, the best tutorial I found after two weeks of playing with the calculator, was by Phil Northcott, one of the creators of EC3: Embodied Carbon Construction Calculator (EC3) Tool | Phil Northcott | ECN Vancouver – YouTube. Just keep in mind that your results of a project’s kgCO2e are only as accurate as the information you put into the calculator…and the embodied carbon counts EC3 provides for you, are only as accurate as the information suppliers and manufacturers provide in their EPDs. There are still a lot of variables and unknowns…but it is encouraging that tools like EC3 are available for public use, and are only getting better as time goes on and the demand for product transparency increases. Please feel free to take a look at the documentation we are supplying to ILFI on our project’s baseline for your own purposes! We will eventually compare our own home’s kgCO2e to this baseline that we mapped in EC3. 

NOTE: If you are a seasoned LCA expert, and you see an error in my documentation, please, please feel free to reach out to me and tell me how I’m wrong!! 🙂 Corrections and peer review would be greatly appreciated!