Designer's Guide to Green Certifications
A Primer for Healthy Homes and Interiors. Who is gatekeeping wellness and sustainable design? WLLW looks at green certifications in brief.
WORDS WLLW Team
A Primer for Healthy Homes and Interiors. Who is gatekeeping wellness and sustainable design? WLLW looks at green certifications in brief.
Navigating the world of products can be tricky, especially if you are environmentally conscious about what you decide to bring into your home. If you’re reading this, that is very likely you.
Much like the labels appearing on foods to denote if they are organic, an array of certifications have arisen for materials within the home industry. Products may have been specifically designed - and, in some cases, also sourced and manufactured - to have minimal impact on human health and the environment.
Hundreds of green certification programs now exist for residential and contract furnishings, measuring everything from the presence of hazardous chemicals, to material transparency, circularity, or how responsibly the manufacturers have used water and other natural resources. Over the coming weeks we’ll be exploring the most important of these in some detail through our guide to green product certifications.
Below we’ve rounded up those we’ll be exploring, denoting which categories they cover and what they examine.
List of certifications:
Declare (including Red List Free)
A transparency platform and product database describing where a product comes from, what it is made of, and where it goes at the end of its life. One can think of Declare as a nutrition label for building products.
Cradle to Cradle (C2C)
Describes a circular design where products made of a component or raw materials are never thrown away but instead reused indefinitely and treated like nutrients –serving as ‘food’ for new products.
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)
Is an international non-profit that promotes responsible management of the world's forests. Products, for instance, a wooden patio table and chairs, carrying the FSC-certified label, means that the product has been harvested from responsibly managed forests.
Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS)
GOTS certifies the organic status of textiles. It achieves this by looking throughout the supply chain, from when raw materials are harvested through environmentally and socially responsible manufacturing practices, all the way to labeling.
Greenguard
Greenguard tests and certifies products for low chemical emissions and sets strict limits on the amount of harmful chemicals that a product can emit into the air that you breathe. These chemicals, known as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), can negatively affect indoor air quality and the health of people within.
OEKO-TEX
OEKO-TEX tests and certifies the textile products you may have in your home to ensure they are safe for human use and don't contain harmful chemicals. The system tests for harmful substances in textiles at every stage of production, from raw materials to finished products, and sets strict limits on the use of certain chemicals in the manufacturing process.
Living Product Challenge
The Living Product Challenge evaluates and recognizes products designed and manufactured in a way that has a positive impact on both people and the environment. To achieve certification, a product must meet a set of criteria that go beyond traditional sustainability measures, including aspects such as the product's material health, social fairness, and net positive impact on the environment. The aim of the Living Product Challenge is to encourage companies to develop products that are regenerative.
Health Product Declarations (HPD)
Health Product Declarations (HPDs) are standardized documents that provide information about the potential health hazards and environmental impacts of a building product. HPDs list ingredients, including any harmful chemicals or toxins, as well as the manufacturer's environmental and social practices related to the product. These are used by architects, designers, and building owners to make informed decisions about the products they use in their projects and to help promote transparency and accountability in the building industry.
Photography: Wojciech Bobrowicz/Adobe
