The new materials toolkit simplifying sustainability decisions

The Common Materials Framework (CMF) is less than five years old, but it has already transformed how people build things. Now, a new toolkit promises to transform how people use the CMF.

Since the CMF’s introduction in 2021, parties across the building industry have gradually adjusted to a modus operandi that prioritizes transparency and health over strictly aesthetic choices. Those parties include architects, engineers, owners, contractors, manufacturers, tech professionals, and the organizations behind ecolabels and standards.

The CMF is a shared language for product sustainability. You can think of it as a reference guide that helps people make sense of the hundreds of standards, certifications, and ecolabels that have flooded markets for the better part of the last three decades, ever since organizations like the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the U.K.’s Building Research Establishment came onto the scene.

Having a shared language within the built environment is unprecedented, especially given the varying scales available to grade and rank buildings and their materials. But the CMF alone is no guarantee that people will make the right decisions or even be able to implement them at scale. The framework was only the first step in reaching the culmination of the decades-old green building movement. 

Earlier this month, mindful MATERIALS (mM) unveiled the CMF Implementation Toolkit at Greenbuild, a sustainability conference held in Los Angeles. Using the CMF’s common language as a launch point, the toolkit has the purpose of aligning materials specifications and procurement with the five impact areas outlined the AIA Materials Pledge, which are climate health, human health, ecosystem health, social health, and circular economy. Whenever an architect, contractor, or building owner prioritizes regenerative materials and sustainable design decisions, the Implementation Toolkit helps streamline those choices, avoid redundancies with manufacturing partners, and quantify the tangible health impacts of decisions.

A beneficial framework for all

The impetus to create the toolkit came from a desire to align standards. Green building certification programs like LEED, BREEAM, Phius, and ENERGY STAR’s Portfolio Manager, among others, generally share the same north star. But the data and requirements within each can feel fragmented and redundant, making “progress hard to measure, and even harder to scale,” according to mM’s toolkit starter guide.

For mM’s president, Annie Bevan, the siloed approach is unsustainable. “There is clearly a need for the entire [building] industry to be able to use neutral systems and a common language that are beneficial to all,” she says. “What we recognized early on is that the data didn’t exist, or if it did, it was all over the place. And so, we thought to ourselves: How do we organize this information and make it understandable so that anyone, no matter your education level, can start to play a part in this work?”

Bevan identifies two distinct but overlapping timelines that are relevant. The first timeline dates back about 25 years, beginning with visionaries like USGBC cofounders David Gottfried and Rick Fedrizzi as well as Nadav Malin, who led USGBC’s Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group when LEED was in its nascency. Such early adopters saw value in designing buildings to last and using materials that supported healthy outcomes. 

By most estimates, the green building movement began in earnest in the mid-to-late 1990s. The systems and standards that give it life accelerated and multiplied from there, growing more cumbersome each year. “That’s the foundation for this consolidation work … [the movement] got really big, and now we’ve been able to bring it all together,” Bevan says. 

The second timeline is more immediate. In October 2022, when the ink was barely dry on the CMF, Bevan had a meeting with leaders from Brightworks Sustainability, a consultancy based in Portland, Ore., and an early supporter of mM. “We were aggregating a library of all the sustainability documentation from all these manufacturers and digitizing that” for the purpose of scoring how sustainable a project was, she recalls. 

This process revealed that the degree of accuracy they sought was unattainable. Problems such as duplication, wasted time, and overlooked data came to bear. In the end, the efficacy of supply chain evaluations, lifecycle assessments, and other tools for quantifying a project’s sustainable impact came into doubt.

Compositing multiple toolkits

As a consolidated system, the Implementation Toolkit isn’t replacing any one standard or certification. Rather, it’s aggregating the lot. The Implementation Toolkit allows the common language that is the CMF to function in real time, like a streamlined design and workflow tool instead of simply a reference guide for optimizing material selections.

The toolkit is a composite of many smaller toolkits. In addition to the AEC/O toolkit, which caters to the larger design and building community, there are individual toolkits for manufacturers, technology providers, and those who manage ecolabels and related performance standards. This comprehensive approach is as equitable as it is inspiring because it means a critical number of players from each stakeholder group had to agree to adopt an industry-wide common language and the idea of automating sustainable material selections. 

“You need something that people can rally around,” says Anthony Guerrero, mM’s executive director. “All these [groups] have been doing passionate and good work for quite a while, but they’ve all done it from their own perspectives of what’s best. And now, they’ve all come together in partnership. They’ve decided mindful MATERIALS has the most effective idea and the best way forward.”

Nothing resembling a singularity movement has taken hold of the broader industry until now. That’s despite the emergence of building certifications like LEED, WELL, Phius, and the Living Building Challenge; product ecolabels like Declare, Cradle-to-Cradle, EPDs, and UL Greenguard; and initiatives like the AIA Materials Pledge and Design for Freedom’s International Guidance and Toolkit. (That group comprises a mere fraction of the standards, labels, and initiatives available today.) The emergence of a toolkit designed to consolidate such an array of guidelines is indeed a milestone. 

Banking on maximum impact

The Implementation Toolkit’s expressed purpose is driving maximum impact reduction and business value for everyone with a stake in the built environment. To honor that purpose, the tool needs to foster understanding and feel accessible to a wide range of professionals. Bevan understands that mandate.

“We are looking much bigger than just automating materials vetting,” she says, referencing the challenge many designers and owners face when attempting to match material specifications and green building certifications to their desired health outcomes for projects. “With this automation, the use of the common language, and the acceleration of a data ecosystem, there is then a means to automate reporting and aggregate data.” 

In layman’s terms, Bevan is saying the toolkit represents the ultimate project and risk management tool. The CMF already accounts for, and is informed by, every significant standard, certification, and label that comprise the green building ecosystem. The toolkit is the aggregator of all of that. 

The toolkit’s benefit is elegant in its simplicity, particularly for many large corporations that, despite political headwinds, have not retreated from fulfilling their ESG obligations. It enables these companies to reduce their exposure to risk because they can determine a building’s holistic value and thus evaluate impact reductions of their supply chain. And as Bevan says, “That’s the ultimate goal of this work.”

Justin R. Wolf is a freelance writer covering architecture and design. He lives in Maine.