Sustainability often faces skepticism or indifference from owners and occupants. The term "green" can sometimes be viewed as a mere checkbox rather than a meaningful commitment and making that commitment can be difficult when every part of the building and materials ecosystems define and label sustainability differently.

Facility managers play a pivotal role in implementing sustainable practices and product sourcing; but where do FMs seeking to exact change within their organizations start in aligning corporate environmental practices with verified and trusted sources for material specification? And how can sustainable product and material sourcing be efficiently integrated with staff procedures and processes?

Forward-thinking organizations and partnerships are dedicated to creating understandable, substantial and actionable changes. One such initiative, led by the 501c3 nonprofit mindful MATERIALS, is the Common Materials Framework (CMF), which represents a significant step toward sustainable manufacturing. The organization is working to reduce and ultimately reverse the holistic embodied impacts of the built environment through collective material choices.

What is the CMF?

The CMF results from a comprehensive, cross-industry effort to streamline and organize more than 150 building product and material certifications and disclosures. By consolidating more than 650 factors related to material sustainability into five core impact categories, the CMF provides a unified language and objective for driving holistic impact. These impact categories are:

  • Human health: The ways that products and materials (or chemicals and processes used to create products and materials) affect the human body.

  • Climate health: The ways that products and materials (and the energy used during their production and operation) contribute to the changing climate.

  • Circular economy: How a material or product’s design considers material inputs and end-of-life streams to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials at their highest value, and regenerate nature.

  • Social health and equality: The ways that individuals involved in the production or living near production or disposal locations of products and materials are affected by these operations.

  • Ecosystem health: How the production of materials affects elements of natural ecosystems, such as water, air, biodiversity and wildlife.

Some examples of difficulties when it comes to applying sustainability to the construction industry include:

  • Disparate requests and no common definition for sustainable materials

  • Market confusion

  • Many standards and certifications with very little time to conceptually understand what they all mean

  • Disconnected data

  • Preventing benchmarking of progress within and across organizations

  • Making holistic impact analysis of products in projects impossible and inconsistent

What’s in it for the FM?

Change can be frustrating when it brings delays and confusion as new processes are established and adopted into the daily workflow. Sometimes, it feels easier to just stick with what has always been done. However, implementing the CMF as part of a facility’s process for sourcing materials was designed to make these duties easier, not create more work for the FM.

The CMF helps align an organization's sustainability goals in a language that is also becoming consistent across the built environment for manufacturers, contractors, architects and designers. When FMs also align with this ask, it can help make vetting decisions easier when sourcing new materials. Therefore, educating and aligning the facility, leadership and staff with the CMF results in the “easy button” for material sourcing.

Implementing this framework:

  • Aligns material requirements that are used across the industry, supporting easier decision making and comparability of products to scale

  • Easily shows what products meet these requirements in tools that are already in use

  • Easily identifies regrettable substitutions and trade-offs across impact categories

  • Helps benchmark and optimize project-level impacts with better product decisions

  • Helps easily educate teams about sustainability and its value

  • Allows vendor and manufacturer partners quantify ROI for sustainability investments

Onboarding the CMF

FMs can be crucial in advocating for and implementing a globally applicable approach to sustainable facility practices. But they are not the only stakeholders at the table, and getting people on board to adopt a new framework for sourcing materials is a different ask depending on how that person functions in the organization.

The C-suite

Most corporate leadership knows and accepts the overall strategic benefits of sustainability: long-term cost savings, regulatory compliance, enhanced corporate reputation and risk mitigation. So, the question for the C-suite is not necessarily “Why should we do this?” but rather “How are we going to do this?”

When proposing strategies such as the CMF to the C-suite, FMs should emphasize how the CMF can help organize a facility’s overall sustainability goals and align with industry peers such as architects, owners and contractors to pursue the same goals. Ultimately, helping minimize duplicated efforts around collecting sustainable product information can further solidify the business case.

Staff

Securing buy-in from staff involves a different approach. For this discussion, focus on education and engagement, illustrating how the CMF can make their work more efficient and align with their organization’s sustainability goals. This might include:

  1. Policy development: Create and implement policies that prioritize the use of sustainable materials in all projects. For example, a policy could mandate the use of products with high recycled content to support the circular economy impact category.

  2. Procedure standardization: Develop standardized procedures for evaluating and selecting building materials, ensuring they meet CMF criteria. This includes incorporating tools and platforms that facilitate easy access to CMF-compliant products.

  3. Collaboration: Connect with other stakeholders in the built environment such as the contractors, architects and designers working on the projects, so efforts are not being duplicated across the value chain.

  4. Training programs: Implement comprehensive training programs to educate staff on the importance of the CMF and how to apply its principles in their daily tasks. Scheduled workshops can reinforce the significance of sustainable practices.

  5. Performance metrics: Establish metrics to measure the success of CMF implementation. Regular audits and reviews can help track progress and identify areas for improvement, ensuring continuous alignment with sustainability goals.

Affecting holistic change

Once the CMF has been adopted, establishing clear policies and procedures aligning with the framework’s principles is critical to ensuring that facilities affect holistic and impactful environmental change. Here are some examples:

  • If a facility is looking to avoid worst-in-class chemicals of concern like PVC, then that would fall into the human health impact category of the CMF. To properly vet PVC-free products, a facility manager should seek declarations for ingredient transparency/optimization like Health Product Declaration (HPD), Cradle to Cradle or Declare.
  • Similarly, most companies have carbon reduction goals. By framing those efforts as part of the climate health impact category, an FM can help reduce Scope 3 emissions by prioritizing manufacturers demonstrating their commitment to low-embodied carbon practices by holding numerous product-specific environmental product declarations (EPDs).
  • A practical example for engaging staff in the circular economy impact category could be evaluating existing materials and intentionally choosing products with post-consumer recycled content, which also typically doubles as providing the added benefit of reducing embodied carbon.
  • Discussing ecosystem health could involve sharing how manufacturing and supply chain environmental impacts are mitigated through certifications like FSC and Cradle to Cradle, reducing pollution and water footprints.
  • Lastly, for social health and equality, FMs can highlight company projects in which employees volunteer globally with nonprofits to demonstrate the social impact of sustainable practices.

The easy button

While the CMF is being established in an organization, there are tools already in place for staff to easily start sourcing products right away. FMs can find products and sustainability data already organized, letting them search for products that meet the sustainability impact areas their organization is focused on.

By leveraging the CMF and incorporating these best practices into policies and procedures, FMs can clear the way for better communication and collaboration across their organization. They can ensure that sustainability is not just a checkbox but a core part of the operational strategy.