Industry pros striving to create healthier buildings
The PAE Living Building, here under construction in April, has required substantial effort by the project team to ensure materials used meet high standards. (DJC file)
Demand for healthier space is surging amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
A recent report, “A New Investor Consensus: The Rising Demand for Healthy Buildings,” revealed that 92 percent of survey respondents (many of the world’s leading real estate investors) expect demand for healthy buildings to grow in the next three years.
Yet the next step of finding healthy and sustainable materials to construct the buildings is a tricky one.
Vaccinated America is reveling in its freedom and leaving the most vulnerable people behind. The Atlantic
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During a pandemic, no one’s health is fully in their own hands. No field should understand that more deeply than public health, a discipline distinct from medicine. Whereas doctors and nurses treat sick individuals in front of them, public-health practitioners work to prevent sickness in entire populations. They are expected to think big. They know that infectious diseases are always collective problems
because
they are infectious. An individual’s choices can ripple outward to affect cities, countries, and continents; one sick person can seed a hemisphere’s worth of cases. In turn, each person’s odds of falling ill depend on the choices of everyone around them and on societal factors, such as poverty and discrimination, that lie beyond their control.
Greentown Labs, the largest climatetech startup incubator in North America,
Saint-Gobain, a multinational manufacturer and distributor of high-performance materials, and the
Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC), an economic development agency dedicated to accelerating the growth of the clean energy sector across the state, recognize the significant role healthy buildings will play in improving the sustainability of the built environment and promoting occupant wellbeing. That s why today, Greentown Labs and Saint-Gobain, with support from MassCEC, have launched the
Greentown Launch Healthy Buildings Challenge, seeking applications from startups with buildings-related technologies that optimize for the health of people and the climate, together.