Health Product Declaration Open Standard Launched

Nadav Malin, president of BuildingGreen and board member of the Health Product Declaration Collaborative, recently expanded on the need for transparency and HPDs as part of EcoHome magazine’s Vision 2020 program. In his essay, "Transparent Future," he writes, "The HPD specifies how ingredients should be listed and defines a series of reference lists that determine if there are any health hazards associated with any of those ingredients.

If there are, those hazards also have to be reported on the form­—not unlike Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs), which have been common for decades. While MSDSs focus on acute health risks, HPDs extend that focus to include risks from long-term, chronic exposures. The HPD aims for 100 percent disclosure—users want to know about all the ingredients in a product, not just a few benign ones. But it also includes an option for companies to keep some ingredients secret as long as they report any health hazards associated with those undisclosed ingredients...