The Pharos Project is a project of the Healthy Building Network. HBN is:

In Vermont:
Melissa Coffin, Bill Walsh

In California:
Tom Lent

In Washington, DC:
Larry Kilroy, Sarah Gilberg, Sarah Pickell, Susan Sabella

In Maine:
Jim Vallette

PHAROS: EVALUATING BEST PRACTICES, NOT BEST INTENTIONS

As we populate the Pharos Project with building products and chemicals, we trust our users are becoming empowered with a better map to guide their green building decisions. To see this at work, take a look at one of the new product profiles we added this week. If you don’t have a subscription yet, please, sign up and start digging.

Last week, in what Environmental Building News described as a “surprising development,” MBDC awarded Dow Chemical’s extruded polystyrene insulation a Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) Silver certification. MBDC also awarded C2C Silver to a little-understood Dow batt insulation called SafeTouch, which we just added to the Pharos system. As EBN explains, designers might interpret C2C Silver Certification to mean that the product is “free of hazards or that it is necessarily a “green product.’”

Dow sheds little light on the chemistry of SafeTouch. The company says what is absent from SafeTouch – “No formaldehyde binders, no acrylic binders, and no borates…” – but little about what is present. The Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for SafeTouch lists three chemicals -- polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene, and a “trade secret Modified PET polymer.” Here’s what is lacking from the MSDS:

• Binders. For decades, formaldehyde - a carcinogen - has been the standard binder used to glue the fiberglass fibers together in batt insulation. If there is no formaldehyde in SafeTouch, as Dow states, then what is binding the fibers?
• Any idea of what is modifying the PET polymer, such as additives and copolymers. There are a wide variety of possible combinations, like stabilizers and cross-linking agents.
• Any idea of whether flame retardants, another common ingredient in batt insulation, are used in what reads like an otherwise combustible product.

It turns out that Dow holds a patent on a product that strongly resembles SafeTouch. We examined U.S. Patent No. 5,407,739, “Ignition resistant meltbrown or spunbonded insulation material.”

From this patent, the Pharos team drew some preliminary conclusions about what might be accompanying the polyethylene and PET in SafeTouch including chemicals like vinyl acetate and ethyl acrylate (both of which are OSHA-listed carcinogens) and polyvinylidiene chloride. Common feedstocks for producing polyvinylidiene chloride include the Proposition 65-listed carcinogens, vinyl chloride and 1,1,2-trichloroethane.

Users may learn more about these ingredients, their hazards, and the chemicals that make them, in the Pharos Chemical and Material Library. This upstream information should be part of any product assessment, especially since so few chemicals have been studied and so many have been exempted from oversight.

While some certification programs may reward intentions, the Pharos Project evaluates practices.

You may also follow the chemical pathways for two other products the Pharos team released this week. One is a styrene-butadiene-rubber rolled flooring sold by VPI Corporation. Like Dow, VPI has not engaged with the Pharos Project, despite repeated requests from our charter members, but we welcome their participation at any time.

The third product is Textrafine, a GreenGuard Children & Schools-certified batt insulation by Anco Products, which includes a phenol formaldehyde binder. As my colleague Tom Lent has reported, fiberglass insulation using phenol formaldehyde can emit significant levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.

Jim Vallette is a researcher with the Pharos Project and the Healthy Building Network.

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