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Buildings

Designing healthy buildings through data

December 7, 2015

Three companies and a non-profit — Flux, Google, Thinkstep and Healthy Building Network —  launched a huge database of 100 commonly used building materials and chemicals with the aim of encouraging the use of environmentally friendly and non-toxic building materials.

Quartz, their open source database, lists items by their category name, such as cement, with no brand names listed to make it a broadly valuable tool in the early stages of building design. 

In this video, Vivian Dien of Flux, project manager of Quartz, explains how until this database was created, there "was a huge barrier" to helping contractors and building owners choose healthy, environmentally friendly materials because data on materials was scattered across many types of certifications, labels and standards.

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