For this installment of “For Your Health” we sat down with Roberto Valle Kinloch, the manager of HomeFree, to talk about healthy building, how HomeFree shares its resources, and what’s coming down the pipeline. HomeFree is an initiative of the Healthy Building Network (HBN) that distills complex research on toxicity into simple, actionable guidance that can be used for safer building material selection. Flame retardants, highly fluorinated chemicals like PFAS, antimicrobials, and many other chemical categories have been snuck into building products that, in many cases, have significant health risks and provide little to no added performance. Large corporate material manufacturers have very little oversight when bringing new building products to the market, despite the new chemical cocktails they may contain. HomeFree helps people make educated decisions early in the design process about which types of materials it’s best to avoid.
Their website has sorted construction types with a simple green to red scale of healthiest to least healthy, so it’s easy to compare different material options for different parts of a building. Even though research services like this typically only include building products and not materials used in their natural form (which would dramatically outperform most products in these health categories), we want to share this information and these resources for those pesky bits of the building that are often only achieved through building products. HomeFree can also be a useful tool for decisions about which materials to reuse and which to keep away from you and your family.
We really enjoyed speaking with Roberto, and have nothing but good things to say about him and HBN’s HomeFree. An abridged and edited version of our interview is reproduced below.
Roberto Valle Kinloch: I manage Home Free, the Healthy Building Network’s (HBN) initiative that supports healthier material selection in the affordable housing sector. We focus on the affordable housing sector because we want to make sure that the knowledge and resources that enable safer product selection reach the people in the communities who stand to benefit the most from it. Today, discussions about material health are often left to experts because we’ve made the issue a little bit difficult by design, resulting in many people specifying or using products without awareness or understanding of the impact of their choices.
My background is in construction engineering, but I soon drifted to the sustainability path to work on renewable energy and energy efficiency. Living in Durham (North Carolina) spurred my interest in local issues, thinking about the world’s problems while trying to figure out how to support the local community. I worked on initiatives related to community organizing, waste reduction, and the circular economy. Through my network, I found an opportunity with the Healthy Building Network [and even though I have] no background in chemistry, it turned out to be a perfect fit.
The Last Straw: What was your learning curve like when you joined Home Free and the Healthy Building Network?
RVK: My role at HBN is to support the transformation of the materials market into safer product use. So, rather than learning about product chemistry, [my role required me to] learn about the context in which products are used, their associated hazards, and the opportunities and challenges the industry faces regarding using safer products. Also, I had to think about the best ways to communicate this information and how to translate complex research into actionable guidance that people can use in their day to day.
We are an organization that is heavily based on research and evidence-based work to produce tools that can be used by practitioners. That said, our goal is that everyone can use this information to make informed decisions, be that a homeowner, a person who’s going to design a school, or even the principal at a school who is trying to understand how they can make better, healthier choices for their new building. An important part of our work is understanding the health impact that toxic products have across their life cycle, from the impact on fenceline communities and workers involved in the manufacturing of these products to the people who install these products, building occupants, and also workers during the reuse and the demolition phase of the building.
So at these different stages, toxic products have an impact on the health of different people and disproportionately impact low-income households and people of color, which is something that is largely lost when we’re talking about material and product health. Often when you’re talking with an architectural design team, developer, or a homeowner about the hazards of a particular product, they want to know if the is gonna hurt [them, or the building occupant]. [And sometimes the answer is:] “this product probably won’t [hurt you].” Still, harmful chemicals may have been used during its production, impacting the health of people along the way, living in places like Cancer Alley (an area in Louisiana along the Mississippi River where a large cluster of petrochemical plants have been documented to severely hurt locals’ health, causing high rates of cancer in particular).
So the lack of awareness and internalization of the harms associated with products that we use every day creates a huge disconnect in how we make our decisions. We published an article not too long ago that’s called “Our Plastic Buildings.” It’s a little bit crazy that sometimes we invest so much effort trying to ban single plastic bags and avoid using straws, but then [the] plastic industry transfers all of these petroleum and fossil fuel-based products to the construction industry. There’s so much plastic in buildings.
Vinyl flooring is all around us and presents a clear example of how the industry, while shifting to safer formulations by avoiding the use of phthalates (a plasticizer that can be a reproductive toxicant) from the final flooring product, uses chemicals during its production that are extremely harmful to those in and around the factories. Until we reach a point where manufacturers account for the harm done across the life cycle of their products, they’ll still be able to provide toxic products at a very low price. Sadly, product cost tends to dominate discussions about product selection, especially in affordable housing.
TLS: Have you seen a big response from manufacturers because of your evaluations of their materials?
RVK: You get both manufacturers who are working to improve their chemistry and also others that are not, because at the end of the day, their decisions are also market driven. If there’s no regulation or demand for healthier products, then there’s not much incentive for the manufacturers to create safer product alternatives.
That’s why product transparency is so essential and why in 2012, the Health Product Declaration (HPD) was born as an initiative from HBN. HPDs were created as an open standard for manufacturers to disclose the content of their products. However, it is ultimately up to the manufacturers to choose what to disclose and the level at which to do so (Ed: If certain ingredients are described by a manufacturer as “proprietary” or a “trade secret”, than those ingredients are exempted from being counted in
certifications in the U.S. This means that product health certifications can often give out a passing score to a product without knowing the complete contents of the product). Ultimately, we want to shift the power to the user by revealing the common content and hazards associated with typically used products and providing a path to safer product use.
Sometimes we spend hours trying to find which carpet option is healthier when the question should be: do you need carpet at all? Sometimes you get stuck in this conversation, but you don’t have the bigger picture of how different product types compare to one another.
TLS: Is there one class of chemicals that you should just avoid at all costs?
RVK: Generally speaking, I recommend using HBN’s product guidance to avoid products in the “red zone.” By doing so, you are avoiding the worst-in-class building products from a material health perspective.
If we are talking about one chemical in specific, you can, for example, avoid a harmful endocrine disruptor known as APE, or Alkylphenol Ethoxylate, simply by switching to a safer paint without impacting your budget.
The thing is, APEs in paints are not commonly disclosed. I went to Home Depot, and I asked, “I’m looking for APE free paint,” and they said, “AP What?” So that’s part of the issue, lack of disclosure and awareness. This is the reason we decided to assess several paints from a couple of manufacturers to create a list of paints that are low/no VOC content, low/no VOC emissions, and APE-free. You can also choose a paint that is green seal Gs-11 certified to ensure it has no APEs.
TLS: Do you have any products that you’ve seen emerge recently that you’re excited about?
RVK: At HBN, we provide guidance at the broad product level. In other words, with the exception of paints, we refrain from calling out specific products. We do this to avoid bias and preserve the integrity of our work. As an organization, we seek to inspire innovation by demanding increased product transparency.
TLS: The Home Free website does such a great job of distilling all this information. In the process of doing that, are there some products where the manufacturing is so devastating to a community that even if it doesn’t have any health defects that it’s lower on the list? What pushes things from one category to the next?
RVK: Absolutely. A product may be harmless to building occupants and still have a significant health impact on fenceline communities and workers. A product like that could be ranked red in our product guidance. Vinyl is a perfect example. Another example is ceramic tiles, which, depending on where they are produced, can introduce lead since some countries still allow using CRT (cathode ray tubes) to produce the glazing.
Sometimes it’s not even about the main product you are using, but the adhesives or other supplementary products that can introduce formaldehyde or other harmful chemicals.
TLS: Do you see every building as a death trap now that you know all this information and all you can see is what’s going to make you sick?
RVK: Not really, but I do have a greater sense of appreciation for how the choices we make impact the health of people along the way, especially people of color and low-income households.
Roberto Valle Kinloch has over 12 years of experience working with local government, nonprofits, and the private sector developing and scaling sustainable building practices. At HBN, Roberto manages the HomeFree initiative to scale the use of healthier building products in the affordable housing sector. Before joining HBN, Roberto led research and development efforts on sustainable building management practices in the U.K. and Norway, and he spearheaded the implementation of a large-scale clean energy program in his home country of Nicaragua. Roberto holds an M.Sc. in Renewable Energy from the University of Reading in the U.K. and a Ph.D. in Energy Management from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway.
