BLOG

Wouldn’t it seem that finding out where a product is made is an easy task?  Not so.

In my quest as a researcher to purchase locally made, sustainably manufactured products for Bright ‘n Green, I’ve repeatedly run into difficulty with the transparency of processes behind many products. To the extent that Customer Service Reps will first claim they can’t tell me that information until after I purchase the product, and then upon further prodding, completely lie to me about the manufacturing location.

We are on this Manufacturing Awareness Crusade for our own ethical reasons, but also because of our desire to comply with a green building certification that is in many ways more aggressive than LEED … the Living Building Challenge.

Thankfully there is Declare – a labeling system pushing for more transparency within the building industry. Declare offers Living Building Challenge Project teams a materials guide for product specification. For manufacturers, it offers an expanded point of entry into these groundbreaking sustainable projects.

Companies can register their products once they have made available where a product was assembled, where it was manufactured, where ALL its component parts were manufactured, every chemical and material it was made from, and where all materials were either mined or manufactured.

I am consistently amazed at the difficulty of simply being an informed consumer, and I hope companies continue to realize the value and ethical responsibility of making this information available to the public.