As an organization, Humanscale continues to focus our efforts on environmental issues and accountability a few years ago. We began this process by carefully auditing and examining every aspect of business – our supply chain, partnerships, products, material ingredients and all the other aspects of our operations that ultimately create our environmental footprint. Over time we developed programs and refined our approaches with new goals in mind. We’ve accomplished a lot in a relatively short time and have transformed our products, partnerships and business.
Living Product Challenge
The Living Product Challenge (LPC) is the highest standard and most rigorous test of sustainability for two mains reasons: it requires that manufacturers are net positive (give back more than they use) and is based on performance, instead of design intent. Brought about by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), the standard was first published in the spring of 2015.
Our sustainability vision has long centered around making a net positive impact. When the LPC standard was published, it was exciting for us to see a framework for evaluating progress toward net positive. We were encouraged to see how many criteria we already met with the way we operated, and were happy to uncover areas where we could expand our sustainability program.
What we did to achieve the challenge:
• Installed a rainwater capture system that provides all production water.
• Improved our recycling rates, diverting 37%, with over 90% of waste from production being diverted.
• Commissioned a toxicologist to confirm no exposure to carcinogens, mutagens, or reproductive toxins.
• Published a JUST label to be more transparent about our social impact.
• Completed Life Cycle Assessments to calculate the carbon, energy and water footprints for each product.
• Made a commitment to be net positive for carbon, energy and water (including our supply chain) for LPC-certified products within three years.
• Implemented hand-printing initiatives to create and measure positive impacts.
• Had three external auditors thoroughly examine every detail of our production sight
Declare Initiative
Declare is a transparency platform and product database that is changing the materials marketplace. The programme’s simplicity and ease of use by both manufacturers and product specifiers have helped fuel market demand for chemical transparency and healthier building products.
Humanscale is leading across all industries in material transparency with more Health Product Declarations (HPDs) and Declare labels than any other company. To date, 60% of Declare labels and 54% of HPDs in the entire industry are published by Humanscale. To date, 57% of Humanscale products carry Declare labels and HPDs. These labels represent Humanscale’s commitment to avoiding red-list materials and chemicals of concern, many of which are common in the furniture industry, including Formaldehyde, PVC, Chrome 6, PFC stain-resistant coatings, and HFR flame retardants.
