February 10, 2025

Architectural Concepts Guide

Elevating Home Design Standards

How companies are reducing plastic in buildings

How companies are reducing plastic in buildings

As Southern California begins its long recovery from the devastating wildfires of recent weeks (and as new fires break out in San Diego), public officials warn of a new threat: unsafe drinking water in affected areas, due to plastic underground water pipes failing. 

What’s more, modern homes are so full of plastic — from foam insulation to luxury vinyl tiles to paints — that when they burn they can become toxic traps that sicken their owners.

Buildings are the second largest use of plastics globally, after packaging, according to Teresa McGrath, chief research officer at Habitable, a nonprofit focused on sustainability in buildings and construction.

“We are not going to be able to address the plastic pollution problem if we’re not talking about plastic building materials,” she said on a recent webinar.

Action in 2025

Habitable and the architectural firm Perkins&Will released a pair of reports on plastic building materials and alternatives in November, aiming to spark dialogue and action across the industry next year, at Green Build, the U.N Ocean Conference, INC 5.2 and other forums.

Among the reports’ findings:

  • Eighteen percent of microplastics in the ocean come from paints applied to buildings. Latex, polyester and high performance polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) paints are applied as plastic films that degrade over time into microplastics and wash into the oceans.
  • The U.S. discards 1.1 million tons of plastic from carpet annually — equivalent to the country’s combined plastic straw, bag and water bottle wastes. While California’s carpet take-back programs have achieved recycling rates of 35 percent, just 0.5 percent of plastic carpet is recycled into new carpet nationally.
  • Building and construction accounts for 70 percent of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) use, the most toxic plastic for human health and the environment. (Vinyl chloride, the starter chemical for PVC, was at the center of the 2023 rail disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.)
  • Demand for plastic building materials is projected to almost double by 2050, surpassing plastic demand for packaging. 

The good news is that reducing plastics in the built environment is “a very solvable problem … almost easier than packaging,” said McGrath in an interview. “We only recently started using plastic in our buildings. We’ve built beautiful buildings for centuries using alternative materials.”

Nonplastic alternatives 

Habitable and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) are piloting the inclusion of Informed Product Guidance, a tool for materials selection that steers builders away from plastics, as a credit in LEED certification, Wes Sullins, director of codes technical development at USGBC, told Trellis. 

Alternatives include the materials of old — wood floors and lime-based paints — along with new plant-based materials, such as cork flooring and pressed paperboard materials, that are emerging as alternatives to PVC floors and polystyrene insulation materials.  

Several suppliers offer such products:

  • Timberhp produces fire-resistant wood-based insulation materials made from compressed softwood chips sustainably harvested.
  • HempStone advises companies on plant-based building materials and installs hempcrete (an alternative concrete made from hemp), lime plaster and hemp insulation batts and board. 
  • Cambium upcycles wood waste into building materials.
  • FloorSauce offers plant-based floor options.

Public school districts and housing developers are replacing plastic building materials with healthier materials, led by architectural firms such as SERA Architects in Oakland, California and Cooper Carry in Atlanta. Cooper Carry has worked with schools in Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, New York and Washington D.C., said Joiana Hooks, designer at Cooper Carry. 

Hempcrete homes are rising in popularity in Europe and the U.S. Minnesota’s Lower Sioux Indian Community is a pioneer in the U.S., building hempcrete homes to fill housing needs. 

Tech companies including Google are also taking a more holistic approach to building materials, said Sullins, although they are not explicitly seeking to reduce plastics.

Look beyond embodied carbon

One reason plastic building materials are popular is because they’re cheap. But fossil fuel subsidies skew the real costs of the materials, which contain thousands of harmful chemicals and pollute at every stage of their life cycle, from extraction to manufacturing to end-of-life.

“Vinyl flooring is simply the cheapest flooring option out there,” said McGrath.  

The focus on “embodied carbon” in building materials can also sometimes lead to a preference for plastic. Embodied carbon is a measure of the amount of carbon that’s generated in creating a product, from extraction to manufacturing to installation to use to end-of-life.

Over the last five years, the building industry has focused on understanding and reducing the embodied carbon of building materials, but the attention hasn’t necessarily been on plastics, said Kimberly Seigel, research knowledge manager at Perkins&Will.

That can lead to lightweight plastics products appearing lower in carbon than traditional building materials. PVC siding, for example, can appear to have less embodied carbon compared to brick or cement fiber siding, which require high heat to produce. 

But focusing exclusively on embodied carbon content can leave out human and planetary health impacts, such as impacts to communities, factory workers and installers, and to our oceans.

Product lifespan is often left out as well, in part because that data is hard to find, Seigel said. But plastic building materials, which wear out faster, may be worse from a carbon perspective over the longer term. 

How companies can reduce plastics in building materials

Understand and select building materials based on their full life cycle.  

Habitable’s Informed and its detailed guide for insulation materials that includes cost and performance data are helpful resources. In addition to guiding companies through the process of selecting alternative materials, the Informed guide can also help them gain buy-in from owners and designers, Sullins said. Deciding to switch from vinyl flooring to, say, natural linoleum will require conversations with clients about cost vs. operational maintenance, and with contractors about installation.   

Integrate product decisions early in the design and construction process.

Engage with your supply chain to discuss availability, cost and performance of nonplastic materials. 

Test alternatives at small scale before fully deploying them to ensure that they meet the desired performance.  

Consider setting plastic reduction goals for building materials that go beyond recycling. 

Most plastic construction and demolition waste is landfilled or incinerated. Some researchers have also questioned the environmental benefits of using recycled plastics in construction materials.

link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Copyright © All rights reserved. | Newsphere by AF themes.