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Current Newsletter:
A New Healthcare Initiative Promises Leadership in Green Building (July 24, 2008)
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A New Healthcare Initiative Promises Leadership in Green Building
Launched in October, 2007, the Global Health and Safety Initiative "puts healthcare leaders at the center of a global movement to support healthy people in healthy communities on a healthy planet." The Healthy Building Network participates in the GHSI, facilitating the Building Materials Subcommittee. In this issue, Bill Walsh interviews the GHSI's new Executive Director Bob Eisenman, Ph.D., who brings to this position 35 years of leadership in health care, including working at Kaiser Permanente for the past 26, most recently as the Director of Public Policy.
The "New Shower Curtain Smell" May Be Toxic to Your Health
A new analysis conducted by two independent laboratories finds that 6 hours after opening a common vinyl shower curtain, it would load a typical bathroom with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) over 16 times the guidelines for indoor air quality established by the U.S. Green Building Council and Washington State Indoor Air Quality Program, and would continue to violate these guidelines for another week.
Transforming Green Marketing: Forbo Flooring Systems
In this issue of the Healthy Building News we look at Forbo Flooring System's new Sustain brochure. In combination with their Annual Health Safety & Environment Report, Forbo has accomplished a real transformation in the dialogue between manufacturers and customers, setting a higher standard, and creating greater expectations of companies seeking to be leaders in the green building movement.
Read This Book
For nearly a decade, the chemical, plastics and timber industries have been attacking efforts by the US Green Building Council to establish LEED™ credits that would discourage the use of materials such as vinyl and unsustainably harvested timber. A new book will change your perspective on these enduring controversies.
In Doubt Is Their Product, Dr. David Michaels, a former Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health under President Clinton, exhaustively documents the rise of the product defense industry and its strategy of using scientific discipline to establish controversies rather than establish facts, as a means of frustrating efforts to address public health risks from asbestos, benzene, aspirin (Reye's syndrome in children) global warming and vinyl. The book casts a new light on the long campaign by chemical, plastics and timber industries opposing LEED™ credits that discourage the use of vinyl and unsustainable timber products.
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