Are your products green?

One can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine these days without seeing an article about “sustainability.” Whatever your feelings about the topic, there is no doubt that concern for the environment has entered the public consciousness. More and more customers are asking, “Is your company manufacturing sustainably?”

This trend toward sustainability affects the building industry. An increasingly common request is for building assessment to be in accordance with popular green building rating systems. And the questions will evolve from voluntary to mandatory as local, state, and national green building codes and standards continue to be adopted. This transition is happening faster than you might expect. For example, the state of California directed the California Building Standards Commission to work with state agencies on the adoption of green building standards for residential, commercial, and public building construction for the 2010 code adoption process. The CALGREEN Code, which is published by ICC, the parent company of ICC-ES, is the nation’s first statewide green building standards code and will take effect January 1, 2011. The CALGREEN code is one of the many codes and guidelines that are taken into account by the SAVE program.

By obtaining a Verification of Attributes Report (VAR) through ICC-ES’s Sustainable Attributes Verification and Evaluation (SAVE) program, a given product will show it’s in accordance with green building rating systems such as LEED or Green Globes, for commercial projects and NAHB and ICC’s National Green Building Standard (ICC-700) or LEED-Homes, for residential projects. 

The business reasons for obtaining a VAR range from regulatory compliance to liability considerations to cost minimization. In the “green” arena, independent conformance verification can help comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s “Green Guides” regarding substantiation of product claims. And if your verification reports also cover attributes that are important to architects, engineers, and builders, it also answers many of the questions currently being fielded regularly by your sales and in-house engineering departments.