Welcome to the Pharos Project Wiki
|
| USGBC Final Report: PVC an Unhealthy Building Material
The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the nation’s largest green building organization, yesterday released its long-awaited assessment of the health and environmental impacts of polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC) building materials.
The report makes clear that PVC, also commonly known as vinyl, is not a healthy building material. A proper accounting of the human health impacts of PVC across its lifecycle, including disposal issues and occupational exposure, finds that PVC leads to the release of dangerous quantities of dioxin and other carcinogens. The report authors found that, “When we add end of life with accidental landfill fires and backyard burning, the additional risk of dioxin emissions puts PVC consistently among the worst materials for human health impacts…”
The report concludes the work of the USGBC’s Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee (TSAC), which conducted the PVC analysis in order to inform the USGBC's LEED Steering Committee on a PVC-related credit within the LEED® Green Building Rating System™...
Read and discuss the full press release here
|
Today's Burning Discussion
|
| Contractors going green: A contractor is looking for others who are transitioning to greener practices. If you are also working on getting Low/No VOC materials on your shelves, share your experience here.
Talkin' LEED: A PharosWiki user states: "I work with the LEED rating system on a daily basis and have yet to find a forum to discuss both the strengths and short comings of the program. I would also like to discuss sustainable strategies my particular interest is the integration of sustainable design elements into the traditional design process." Join him in this discussion.
Pharos Team is looking for your comments on the Equality, Community Contributions, Occupational Safety and Consumer Safety aspects of the Pharos Lens. Check out our brainstorming ideas on benchmarking the social and community categories and give us your comments and suggestions. Pharos is an open source project always looking to improve. Your comments on these issues submitted by March 15, 2007 will contribute to the Pharos Label v.1. to be release in Spring 2007.
|
If you consider yourself cyber-challenged, don’t fret!
|
| Note to the self-proclaimed cyber-challenged amongst us: many of us on the Pharos Team feel your pain! Even the idea of using a Wiki and all that it implied was intimidating at first. But, discussing, creating, editing, pasting, linking and all those other famous Wiki functions were easier and more intuitive than even the techno-phobes on our team expected. To help ease you in, check out Quick Start. For help with basic editing functions, visit the cheat sheet. You can even practice using the Wiki by playing in the sandbox before tackling one of the pages on this site. So, go for it!
|
|
What's New - January 5, 2009
|
|
|
New Product Added
|
| Window products
Door and frame products
Paint and coating products
Resilient flooring products
Add a new products - it's as easy as following the product page template.
|
Dive Into the
Portals
|
- Labels & Standards: pages in this section discuss green labels and third party certification systems (such as Green Seal), standards and rating systems, and corporate and governmental policies (such as PVC policies)
- Pharos Framework: This area hosts the discussion about how to evaluate building materials and products proposed in the Pharos system.
- Products: Pages in this section are devoted to discussions of product classes (such as carpet) and specific products.
|
|
