About Pharos
The Pharos Project seeks to define a consumer-driven vision of truly green building materials and how they should be evaluated in harmony with principles of environmental health and justice. The Project’s foundation will be building a community to develop this vision, comprised of those who use building materials working with those who study their impacts on health and the environment. The principles of the Pharos Project are transparency, comprehensiveness, independence, accuracy and fairness applied to analyzing the impact building materials have on human health, the environment and communities – during production, use, and at the end of their useful life.
Pharos Framework
Pharos has initiated the development of a Framework to define this comprehensive view across the life cycle. 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. These ideals and criteria seek to reflect the broad range of categories that make up the impact of building materials on the world and will change over time as our knowledge progresses.
The goal of Pharos is not to supersede other efforts to establish performance standards based on industry consensus, but rather to put those standards in context. Pharos will be designed to reflect the fact that, most current “green” standards are just mileposts, at best, on the road to green and, at worst, they lead the user astray.
Pharos Tools
Over the next year, Pharos will create tools and forums to enable architects, designers, specifiers, commercial and retail purchasers, and other interested parties to help develop the Framework and use it to compare products. Participants will engage in discussions about how to define green materials; set ideals and criteria for evaluation of products; and, offer and evaluate available information about specific building products. This will be done through the following tools:
Pharos Wiki & Discussion Boards
The first tool to be released will be the Pharos Wiki. The Wiki will be the Pharos Project’s primary tool to independently inform, educate and empower consumers and others to make the most responsible building material choices. Further, through our public discussion boards we aim to provide feedback to manufacturers on the environmental performance characteristics consumers desire in products. Doing so, we believe, will benefit manufacturers that are interested in being true leaders in sustainable business and manufacturing practices.
> Register to participate in the Pharos Wiki
Pharos Lens
Drawn from the lighthouse metaphor, the Pharos lens offers a guide to the information available from the Pharos Project. The lens is a new tool for signaling and documenting the environmental and social performance of products in the marketplace. The Pharos Label (see below) will accompany the lens and offer more information than any other green label in the market, including the ability to compare the actual ingredients and attributes of products that bear the label. Together, the lens and label will allow Pharos users to determine the attributes most important to them.
Pharos Label
The Pharos Label is designed specifically to address the needs of the consumers, most of whom have to make relatively quick decisions about products. Our label contains consistent and detailed information, that is presented simply and in a familiar, friendly format.
> Learn how the Pharos label works
Manufacturer Paricipation in Pharos
As Pharos develops, manufacturers will be welcome and invited to participate in the Pharos Project by providing product information and data. For manufacturers wanting to get their product officially ‘rated’ by the pharos protocol a technical manual will be provided that outlines the process in detail for each of the wedges. The manual would be then used by an accepted third-party reviewer to help a manufacturer track and report data for participation in the program. Once a product has been successfully evaluated, the manufacturer may then use the label on their product and the official data is published on the Pharos website. |
