Guest blog post by the team at Tricia Love Consultants:

A tiny new building in Hawke’s Bay is breaking world records. Unison Networks’ Windsor Substation Switchroom recently became the first Landscape and Infrastructure project in the world to receive Living Building Challenge vs4.0 Petal Certification. Living Building Challenge is considered the most rigorous sustainable building certification in the world and is administered by the International Living Future Institute.

Some of the notable sustainable design outcomes include:

• Generating all energy on site with excess stored for resiliency / sent back to grid
• Captured rainwater supplying all water needs
• 209% less carbon associated with primary materials than a typical substation
• 48.5% of materials used were sourced within 2,000km of site
• 99% of construction waste was diverted from landfill
• Biophilic design incorporated throughout the project
• Native ecology being restored on site

One of the Living Building Challenge ‘Petal’ imperatives is called the Red List. The intent behind this imperative is to drive the building materials market towards full transparency in product ingredients, to enable specifiers to make informed choices around the use of healthy non-toxic products. The Red List is a list of chemicals commonly used in our building materials which are rated worst in class for their negative effect on human and environmental health. Through the Living Building Challenge, project teams engage with manufacturers for the elimination or replacement of Red List chemicals contained within their products.

The Declare Label is an ingredients transparency label available to manufacturers who wish to make their product data publicly available (like a food ingredients label). Declare Labels are all posted on a public global database which is the first port of call for any team engaging in healthy materials research. There are now over 1200 products worldwide with this Label (a growth of 20% in the last year) and it is also recognised as a product certification initiative in the GBCA Responsible Products programme.

Each material put into the Unison Networks’ Windsor Switchroom project was researched — we wanted to know if the product contained any red list chemicals, how far it had to travel to reach the project site, if it was sustainably sourced, and if it contained any Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). Each manufacturer was asked to declare their product's ingredients, being transparent so we could make informed decisions with the intent of using only healthy non-toxic materials in the Windsor Switchroom.

We just had a look back through all of our materials used and wanted to give a round of applause and a big shout out to the manufacturers who declared 100% of their product ingredients and the ones who have Declare Labels so we didn’t need to research their products at all.

Here they are!

• Aquaknight Industries Ltd
• ColorCote
• Ecoglo New Zealand
• Evcco
• Firth
• Holyoake by Price
• KLC
• Koppers Performance Chemicals
• Laminex New Zealand
• Nuralite Waterproofing Ltd
• OMEGA Windows + Doors
• Plytech
• Pro Clima New Zealand
• TriCab Engineered Cable Systems
• XLam

Thank you for facilitating Windsor’s Living Building Challenge Petal Certification, by providing the market with transparent products that avoid the use of red list chemicals.

Meet the team behind this project:

Client: Unison Networks
ESD / Living Building Challenge Consultant: Tricia Love Consultants
Architect: Charissa Snijders Architect
Contractor: Gemco Group
Structural: LHT Design
Solar: Freenergy
Landscape: Resilio Studio / South Pacific Landscapes