About Pharos - F.A.Q.

Pharos F.A.Q.

What is Pharos?
Why another rating system?
What sets Pharos apart?
Where will the data come from and how will we know if it is reliable?
Wouldn't public input tarnish scientific data?
What is the Pharos Lens?

Q. What is Pharos?

At the broadest level, Pharos is an initiative to redefine the way materials are manufactured and purchased. By defining a framework for evaluating products revealing environmental, resource and social performance, Pharos aims to provide consumers with the information needed to make informed purchasing decisions.

The Pharos Project is made up of three elements: the Framework, Lens, and Wiki.

The Pharos Framework proposes categories for analysis, covering health, resource sustainability and social justice (e.g., occupant exposure, renewable materials, and corporate responsibility). Each category is defined by an intent that describes the problem to be solved and an ideal set of attributes that address that intent. Key questions and criteria establish a rating system to measure progress toward the ideal.

The Pharos Lens illustrates the rating a product's rating in an easy to grasp graphic format along with a label listing critical product content information. A comparative chart format for expressing the ratings of different products for quick comparison is also planned.

The Pharos Wiki is a virtual commons where building material users can discuss green materials, both to help develop the Framework and Lens and other tools and to directly discuss and harness collective knowledge about the environmental and social performance of specific products and materials and how they are evaluated.

Finally, Pharos is a work in progress. It is challenging to reconcile the desire for transparency and comprehensiveness, with the need to be user friendly and empowering. It is all the more challenging to try to strike this balance for the first time, in a system that has not up to this point required or even requested much of the information needed to make informed decisions about the overall impacts of the products we take for granted in an industrial society. But we are optimistic that working together we can achieve our vision.

Q. Why another rating system?

A plethora of standards, labels, and ratings address the environmental characteristics of building materials - with more coming online on a regular basis. The challenge is sorting out the green from the green wash, and putting into context this bewildering array of eco-labels. Some are good, reliable sources of information, but address only one aspect of a material's impact, such as indoor air quality or recycled content. Some represent the consensus of stakeholders and have a process for update and change, while others are developed and managed solely by industry trade associations and are protected from change. Many are based on meeting a "good-enough" standard and don't differentiate between the products that are squeaking past and those that are going the extra mile to become best practice. Some issues aren't addressed at all by any standard.

Pharos is not a replacement standard. Rather, it is designed to work with current standards, labels, and rating systems to help place them into context, providing a more complete picture of the full impact of a product. By signaling ideal goals rather than stopping at standards, Pharos also aims to signal to manufacturers a path toward these ideals and encourage continuous improvement for market transformation.

Q. What sets Pharos apart?

Pharos seeks to define a consumer driven vision of green building materials, evaluated in harmony with the principles of environmental health, material sustainability and social justice. Pharos will rely upon the creation of a community to develop this vision and share experiences on evaluating materials, bringing together building materials users with those who study their impacts on health and the environment. Manufacturers respectful of the process will be encouraged to participate in these communities and to contribute to the discussions and development of Pharos.

Transparency, comprehensiveness, independence, accuracy and fairness are all key principles of the Pharos project. Empowerment is also a key principle. The point is to assist people in using their professional training and judgment to evaluate the weight of available evidence about building products, and to make informed decisions.

Pharos building material evaluations are as rigorous as possible, but will not shy away from addressing new and controversial issues in the service of analyzing the full range of impacts of a material on communities, human health, and the environment over the entire lifecycle of a product. Pharos acknowledges both the value and the limits of product life cycle analysis. Pharos also includes indicators that have not been well measured by traditional life cycle analysis tools, such as whether a material poses a chemical health hazard, creates indoor exposures, and includes sustainable materials.

Q. Where will the data come from and how will we know if it is reliable?

Pharos will strive to use third party verified data according to agreed upon standard practices whenever possible. Pharos recognizes that in this rapidly developing arena, there is often a lack of consensus on standards of measurement as well as an overall absence of data on products and on issues that should be included in the analysis. Where third party verified data are not available, other data sources may be used to inform the product evaluation. Sources of data and verification will be clearly identified and the online community will be actively engaged in critiquing and policing it.

Additionally, the Pharos Project has created a data confidence scoring methodology, recognizing the fact that data origins affect quality. Learn more about the Pharos data confidence scoring methodology in the "About" section of this website.

Q. Wouldn't public input tarnish scientific data?

The assessment of building materials is marked by scientific information that is often missing, highly controversial, or supplied directly by manufacturers with a profit stake in its outcome. Open Source sharing, development and critique can help improve our collective understanding of the quality and availability of scientific data and help us make informed decisions where scientific data is missing or controversial.

Q. Wouldn't public input tarnish scientific data?

The Pharos Lens is a new tool for signaling and documenting the social, environmental and human health performance of products and materials. The Lens is comprised of a series of wedges, corresponding to the categories in the Pharos Framework, each assigned to a different social or environmental issue. The wedges of the lens are grouped into three sectors: 1) environment and resources, 2) health and pollution, and 3) social and community. The Lens is organized around concentric circles creating the evaluation scale for each wedge. The scales will not be the same for every wedge, but instead will reflect the particular set of issues that govern it.

The Lens organizes a vast amount of important environmental and social information into a format that is easily grasped by the consumer. Color is used to differentiate levels of performance; from poor performance red, through yellow as the product improves, to green for the best performers. The Lens demonstrates the complexity of material evaluations by highlighting all the issues at once, showing some products may do well on some issues but poorly on others. Overall, consumers will be able to make their own independent and informed material purchasing determinations based on the range of issues identified through the Lens.