Google-Backed Database Promotes Sustainable Building Design
Date Posted: November 13, 2015
Posted In: Ideas, News,
From SustainableBrands.com: Google, along with thinkstep, architecture and engineering tech company Flux and nonprofit Healthy Building Network (HBN), last week launched a new collaborative open data initiative to combine health and environmental impact data on building materials that empowers the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry to achieve greater sustainability.
The Quartz database is the result of a year-long collaboration known as The Quartz Project, whose overall mission is to promote the transparency of building product information. Now freely available to building owners, architects and sustainability specialists, as well as to the general public, the database brings together for the first time data on the impacts building materials have on both human health and environmental sustainability.
The database will serve as a catalyst for more sustainable materials by providing baseline information for the AEC industry, Google and its partners claim. The database aggregates and standardizes the industry’s current supply of isolated, disjointed data into an open database of relevant, valuable and actionable information that is well organized and easy to understand.
For the first time, key AEC stakeholders will have an open, vendor-agnostic mechanism to compare, contrast and evaluate materials based on their impact on the environment and human health, according to Google.