Pharos F.A.Q.
- What is Pharos?
- Why another rating system? What’s wrong with the current ratings and labels?
- What sets Pharos apart?
- What’s Open Source and how does it improve Pharos?
- Where will the data come from and how will we know if it is reliable?
- What materials will Pharos cover?
- Wouldn’t public input tarnish scientific data?
- When will we be able to rate products?
- What is the Pharos Lens?
Q. What is Pharos?
The Pharos Project is made up of three elements: the Framework, Lens, and Wiki.
The Framework proposes categories of environmental concern for analysis, covering health, resource sustainability and social justice (e.g., occupant exposure, renewable materials, and corporate responsibility). Each category is defined by an intent that describes the problem to be solved and an ideal set of attributes that address that intent. Key questions and criteria are then used to establish a rating system to measure progress toward the ideal goal.
The Lens offers a tool to illustrate the rating for a product in an easy to grasp graphic format along with a label listing critical product content information. A comparative chart format for expressing the ratings of different products for quick comparison is also planned.
The Wiki provides a virtual commons where we invite the building material user community to discuss green materials, both to help develop the Framework and Lens and other tools and to directly discuss what we collectively know about the environmental performance of specific products and materials and how they are evaluated.
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Q. Why another rating system? What’s wrong with the current ratings and labels?
A plethora of standards, labels, and ratings are now available addressing the environmental characteristics of building materials. The challenge is sorting out the green from the green wash, and putting into context this bewildering array of eco-labels. Some are good, reliable sources of information, but address only one aspect of a materials’ impact, such as indoor air quality or recycled content. Some represent the consensus of stakeholders and have a process for update and change, while others are developed and managed solely by industry trade associations and are protected from change. Many are based on meeting a “good-enough” standard and don't differentiate between the products that are squeaking past and those that are going the extra mile to become best practice. Some issues aren’t addressed at all by any standard.
Pharos is not seeking to replace current standards. Rather it is designed to work with current standards, labels, and rating systems to help place them into context, providing a more complete picture of the full impact of a product. By signaling ideal goals rather than stopping at standards, Pharos also aims to signal to manufacturers a path toward these ideals and encourage continuous improvement for market transformation.
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Q. What sets Pharos apart?
Pharos seeks to define a consumer driven vision of green building materials and how they should be evaluated in harmony with the principles of environmental health, material sustainability and social justice. Pharos relies upon the creation of a community to develop this vision and share experiences on evaluating materials. This community will bring together those who use building materials with those who study their impacts on health and the environment. Manufacturers respectful of the process will be encouraged to participate in these communities and to contribute to the discussions and development of Pharos.
Transparency, comprehensiveness, independence, accuracy and fairness are all key principles of the Pharos project. Pharos building material evaluations are as rigorous as possible, but will not shy away from addressing new and controversial issues in the service of analyzing the full range of impacts of a material on communities, human health, and the environment over the entire life-cycle of a product. Pharos includes indicators that have not been well measured by traditional life cycle analysis tools, such as whether a material poses a chemical health hazard, creates indoor exposures, and includes materials that are sustainable.
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Q. What’s Open Source and how does it improve Pharos?
Rather than establishing a closed centralized model of development, Pharos borrows both philosophy and technology from the Open Source movement in computer software and operating systems development. Open Source encourages many different perspectives and agendas to percolate simultaneously during the development process. Pharos adopts completely the principles of the Open Source movement which, in part, include:
- Plan to throw one away. You will, anyhow.
- Release early. Release often. And listen to your users.
- Often the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
- Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid improvement and effective debugging.
- The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users.
HBN is committed to engaging many users in helping to develop Pharos in an ongoing, iterative way. You will have the opportunity to become part of an online community established for the purpose of informing the Open Source process of Pharos. Pharos will benefit from Open Source technology by bringing into the same “virtual room,” parts of the market that don’t always talk with each other – consumers, manufacturers, designers, certifiers, architects, etc. Open Source will allow the development of Pharos to be organic, responsive to our growing understanding of the impacts associated with our material choices, and inclusive with many collaborators helping to define and shape the future of green materials.
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Q. Where will the data come from and how will we know if it is reliable?
Pharos will strive to use data that is third-party-verified according to agreed upon standard practices whenever possible. Pharos recognizes that in this rapidly developing arena, there is often a lack of consensus on standards of measurement as well as an overall absence of data on products and on issues that should be included in the analysis. Sources of data and verification will be clearly identified and the online community will be actively engaged in critiquing and policing it.
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Q. What materials will Pharos cover?
While Pharos is initially focused on building materials, this system could potentially apply to any product or material. Initial products considered for evaluation will include building materials that have previously been evaluated and which have readily available, quality data. This will include product evaluations recently completed by project partners and trusted parties within the Pharos community.
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Q. Wouldn’t public input tarnish scientific data?
The assessment of building materials is marked by scientific information that is often missing, highly controversial, or supplied directly by manufacturers with a direct profit stake in its outcome. Open Source sharing, development and critique can help improve our collective understanding of the quality and availability of scientific data and help us make informed decisions where scientific data is missing or controversial.
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Q. When will we be able to rate products?
Pharos will soon offer on-line forums for discussing evaluation of product classes (such as carpets) and specific individual products. Using open source technology users will participate in creating evaluations utilizing the Pharos conceptual framework. Pharos seeks to compare declared environmental attributes of building materials against one another and against ideal impact scenarios. They will be able to share experience and knowledge about materials and products with other users and experts. The forums also will provide a place for users to compare the meaning and values of various labels and rating systems currently used in the marketplace, as well as customize evaluation criteria to reflect the user’s own values, priorities, and experiences.
Parallel to the subjective product discussions, we will continue the development of the objective tools used to develop comparative metric ratings in the Pharos framework, including the Pharos Lens and labels. These will be released as development allows in 2007.
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Q. What is the Pharos Lens?
The Pharos Lens is a new tool for signaling and documenting the social, environmental and human health performance of products and materials in the marketplace. The Lens is comprised of a series of wedges, corresponding to the categories in the Pharos Framework, each assigned to a different social or environmental issue. The wedges of the lens are grouped into three sectors: 1) environment and resources, 2) health and pollution, and 3) social and community. The Lens is organized around concentric circles creating the evaluation scale for each wedge. The scales will not be the same for every wedge, but instead will reflect the particular set of issues that govern it.
The overall intent of the tool is to organize a vast amount of important environmental and social information into a format that is easily grasped by the consumer. Color is used to differentiate levels of performance; from poor performance red, through yellow as the product improves, to green for the best performers. The lens demonstrates the ultimate complexity of material evaluations by highlighting all the issues at once, showing some products may do well on some issues but poorly on others. Overall, consumers will be able to make their own independent material purchasing determinations based on the range of issues identified through the Lens.
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