Charley Stevenson, Principal Partner at Integrated Eco Strategy, discussed the importance of data-driven insights in selecting healthier building materials. He highlights the challenges of gathering and analyzing data, particularly in the early stages of innovation. Their Red2Green platform streamlines the research process and provides easy access to information on healthier materials. By leveraging existing research and sharing data widely, project teams can make more informed decisions and democratize access to better choices while also creating innovative solutions that reimagine the building process.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Charley Stevenson: I’m Charley Stevenson, I’m the Principal at Integrated Eco Strategy. We have a software platform called Red2Green. I’ve been in high-performance buildings since 2008. Before that I was a college administrator and a math educator, so this is really a course correction. I’ve been interested in environmental fields forever. The work that I do is a mix of education, technical development, and project management, which has a lot of diplomacy around setting and achieving ambitious project goals.
We’ve gathered a lot of data about which products make up different kings of buildings. So a building that starts as a hole in the ground and gets built all the way up to the rafters and the roof might have 1,000 or 1,200 products in it. At the end, you think about the shopping list of things that actually go into make the building. When you do a renovation project, the list is actually not that much smaller, because the outside of the building, it’s a lot of big things, you know, such as what’s the structure made out of? What are the walls made out of? When you get into the inside of the building, you know, the room that we’re sitting in, might have 70 or 100 products in it. So the difference between a renovation and a new building isn’t as large as you might think, looked at through the lens of the products that are selected and ultimately installed.
Within the narrow niche of our work in green building materials — particularly focused on the health impact of materials — there really aren’t a lot of incentives. 10 or 15 years ago, this was viewed as cutting-edge work. And there were organizations that would write grants in support of this innovation. Now, it’s kind of at an awkward transition point where it’s not so groundbreaking to be grant-worthy. And it’s also not so mainstream to be mainstream. So I think we’re really trying to shepherd this particular part of the market through this transition so that we have breakthroughs, making these more ambitious goals, easier to achieve for a much wider range of projects, which in turn is what it will take for it to democratize access to these better choices.
In the early days of healthier building materials, everything was custom. Someone would need to call a manufacturer and ask a long list of questions, process those responses, and make a determination. It took us six to eight hours per product to make a decision through broader awareness on the part of manufacturers, through just repetition and accumulation of data. New products take much less time to research because there isn’t as much background work that needs to be done. When products have already been researched, that information is now available to project teams on our platform so that they get a huge jumpstart. If the research has already been done, you’re replacing a six-hour research task with a 10-minute decision. This is particularly around healthier materials. These gains can be unlocked because everyone has the same questions once the research has been done. It can be published and shared very widely. And you know, back to the point about what the difference between a new construction project and a renovation project is. Every single project in the country has drywall and paint. So nobody needs to reinvestigate those particular product categories. You can really reuse and jump right to the front of the line in terms of better materials decisions.
Are you working to find community and opportunity as a Massachusetts startup founder? Join MFN and get access to experts, networking opportunities, and connections within the statewide entrepreneur ecosystem.
