We like the Living Product Challenge (LPC)of the International Living Future Institute (ILFI)for the very reason that it is so challenging but also positive by design. In a world increasingly awash with “greenwash,” it is encouraging to find a green certification program that is serious, collaborative, authentic and positiverather than simply negative.
By negative I’m referring to the fact that most sustainability programs are focused on reducing or eliminating bad things. The goal of such systems is to make the built environment more sustainable and less damaging to ecosystems and human health by eliminating harmful chemicals and processes. That negative is good.
The LPC does that too, but it doesn’t stop there. It tries to encourage companies to look for positive impacts as well.
We’re all familiar with the term “footprint” as it relates to things that are bad for ecosystems or human health. For example, your “carbon footprint,” is a measure of how much carbon you put into the atmosphere. With footprints, the idea is to reduce bad things to a “Net Zero” if possible. However, for most products manufactured in real world factories, the quest for Net Zero negatives pretty quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. So the collaborators (more on that in a minute) who were devising the LPC came up with the concept of “handprints.”
If a footprint is a list of the negatives involved in a company’s operations, a handprint is a list of offsetting positives that invigorate ecosystems or add to human health and happiness. Handprint requirements call out positive activities or characteristics involved in manufacturing the product but also may be outside of the company’s direct business activities. They may impact the local community or even take place in the communities of the company’s supply chain. The important thing is that the activity is judged to increase the overall good.
A good analogy is to think of handprinting as you would think of your banking activity. If footprints = withdrawals, handprints = deposits, and a positive balance in the account = the state of net positive (when the total number of handprints is greater than the total number of footprints).
I appreciate that the language used throughout the various ILFI programs conjures images of nature. When ILFI decided to develop the LPC, it realized that the best way forward would be to collaborate with companies that would later be involved in trying to earn certification for their products, so it came up with the idea of “Chrysalis.” Says ILFI documentation, “The Chrysalis is a group of partner companies that are creating pilot Living Products. We’re collaborating with these companies on the ongoing development of the Living Product Challenge Standard.”
The early adopters involved in the Chrysalis program can be found in the graphic shown. These companies have demonstrated a laudable commitment to true sustainability and should be so recognized; rather than listing their names, I chose to use the graphic and company logos to better communicate who they are.
I was happy to see that the Chrysalis included some of “our companies;” companies very familiar to those of us concentrating on the interiors portion of workplace design and furnishing: Humanscale, LightArt, Mohawk Group, Tarkett and Teknion. All of them deserve our gratitude for their time and effort in helping develop a standard we can all support that will actually make a difference as it grows.
We might call the Chrysalis group the earliest adopters, because since the inception of the program the group of early adopters collaborating on the development of the standard has grown to 50 (see the LP-50 graphic for the list of members).
I’ve written before about the Lichen project of the Mohawk Group (see that story here), but this story is about Humanscale.
The Living Product Challenge contains seven performance categories called Petals: Place,Water,Energy,Health and Happiness, Materials,Equityand Beauty. Petals are subdivided into a total of 20 Imperatives, each of which focuses on a specific sphere of influence. A product needn’t achieve the requirements of all 20 imperatives to begin to be recognized as having a positive impact, but it must achieve certification in all seven Petals in order to achieve full ”Living Product” certification.
Since the launch of the Living Product Challenge in 2015, 20 products have achieved at least Petal Certification, and James Connelly, Vice President, Products + Strategic Growth at ILFI tells me that as of today, there are another 30 products in the pipeline, actively pursuing certification. Of the 20 certified products, 18 are Petal Certifications. Only 2 have achieved the full on “Living Product” certification, and those products, the Diffrient Smart Chair and the Float Table, are both by Humanscale. I write this not to diminish the accomplishment of Petal certification, but to bestow some hard earned bragging rights upon Humanscale.
I recently traveled to Humanscale’s manufacturing facility in Piscataway, NJ, in search of answers to two questions. What does it mean to the company and to the company’s customers? And how did they do it?
I was fortunate to be able to sit in on a sustainability team meeting led by Jane Abernethy, LEED AP and Humanscale’s Sustainability Officer, who was joined by Alexander Tselepis, Sustainability Coordinator, and Luke Zhou, Lead Sustainable Materials Specialist. The meeting was a rapid fire update on various issues in process, but it gave me a sense of the complexity and difficulty of identifying and removing problematic chemicals from products we use everyday. It isn’t a matter that a company unilaterally controls.
The Materials Petal process involves a continuous search for materials that are less harmful and more sustainable and meet the quite stringent performance criteria of commercial office products.
Mr. Zhou is well qualified to understand the subtleties of chemical composition. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Material Science and Engineering and a master’s degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. He reported on his ongoing efforts with various suppliers, many of whom don’t have the answers he needs and have to turn to their suppliers, who, I’m sure have to turn to theirs. Once a harmful chemical is identified, the research on how it might be possible to replace it begins in earnest, but even when a replacement is identified a company can’t just dictate to suppliers – actually bringing it to fruition is a complex diplomatic negotiation.
As I listened to the back and forth in the meeting, I thought I’d found the answer to my “what does it mean?” question. It struck me forcefully, that no matter what level of certification Humanscale has achieved, it has organized a high-functioning leadership team of very intelligent professionals to work full time on sustainability. That, in itself, is a valuable asset and competitive advantage. And it grants credibility to its commitment to the process of continuously improving the environmental impact of the company.
After the team meeting Ms. Abernethy gave me a tour of the facility to show me some of the physical changes Humanscale has made at the Piscataway location in order to meet various LPC Imperatives. Note that Energy and Water are two mandatory petals that must be met in order to receive any certification at all.
The Energy Petal requires that the project must generate more energy than it consumes, so Humanscale first worked to reduce the amount of electricity the plant was consuming by installing skylights and more efficient lighting fixtures throughout the plant. That combination of investments both reduced electric consumption and improved the lighting conditions for the workers.
The next step was to install a large enough solar system on the roof to generate net positive power. Ironically, at this point the company ran up against a legal roadblock. New Jersey has a law regulating the installation of solar systems. It only allows a company to install up to a maximum of 85% of its electrical needs, thus avoiding an issue many states have with sustainable energy integration with and disruption of a stable electrical grid. But the upshot to Humanscale was that it couldn’t produce more energy than the whole facility was using. However, the system clearly exceeded the energy required for the manufacture of Diffrient Smart and Float Table, so it received the Energy Petal.
The Water Petal requires a project to save more water than it consumes. There are various strategies for meeting this Petal, but I like the one Humanscale chose. It put in a rainwater catch and filter system that more than meets the needs of its manufacturing process.
Another Petal is Health and Happiness. One of its Imperatives is that employees have access to the outdoors. Humanscale redesigned the area just outside the employee cafeteria, installing a concrete deck with picnic tables and umbrellas. They also added a walking/running trail around the plant for the use of employees and neighbors. The excess water from the rainwater capture system is used to irrigate the landscaping that was put in to beautify the surroundings of the plant, so that employees would not only have accessto the outside but would actually want to go out there. I visited on a rainy day, but I still saw some people walking on the path.
I know for a fact that moving an entire organization in a direction that many see as outside the scope of their work is not easy. Doing so requires a champion who is a true believer that the chosen path is the right path. And it was very clear to me that Ms. Abernethy and her team are true believers in the benefits of a sustainable economy. But I had to ask her whether they were in a lonely slog up an unforgiving hill or whether they felt the sustainability effort had widespread support in the Humanscale organization.
She said, “Bob King [Humanscale CEO] has always been an advocate for sustainability, and as he has seen the positive results of the LPC, he has become an even more enthusiastic supporter of the program. Obviously our efforts are dependent on his active support.”
“A lot of the credit goes to my team. They’re really good at getting people in our organization as well as in the supply chain to go above and beyond their normal duties to help us achieve our goals. And I have to say that as we go along we are building momentum, even though it sometimes seems the task gets harder and harder. I’d also like to mention that we get a lot of support from ILFI and from the collaboration we enjoy with the other companies engaged in the movement.”
Being the company with the only fully certified “Living Products” temporarily gives the Humanscale marketers and sales people a fantastic bragging right. Having Ms. Abernethy and her team and their know-how gives the company a real leg up with respect to building a sustainable future.