Pharos F.A.Q.

How Are Products Scored In Pharos?

Pharos is a dynamic tool that is intended to help commercial buyers evaluate product content, certifications and other relevant data about building materials against key health, environmental and social impact benchmarks. Pharos provides unmatched transparency and depth of information about a product’s impacts, not only during use, but also upstream in manufacture and (coming soon) downstream at the end of a product’s useful life. The Pharos system provides transparency at many levels of the system, which allows users to see what is behind the Pharos evaluations and scoring. You can explore these here [hot link].

Pharos also provides users with a comparative, multi-attribute analysis of these impacts in the form of numerical and color-coded scores. These scores are based upon the Pharos Framework. The Pharos Framework provides a set of general criteria, i.e. impact categories, against which we can and should evaluate all of our products.

There are currently four active categories:

• IAQ & other Toxic User Exposure identfying indoor air quality and user exposure issues;
  
• Manufacturing and Community Toxics identifying manufacturing chemical hazards for workers and surrounding communities;
  
• Renewable Materials assessing recycled and bio-based content used in the product; and
  
• Renewable Energy reflecting the amount of renewable energy used in the manufacturing facility/ies where the product is made and in the supply chain.

Pharos scores products on a ten-point achievement scale within each impact category. Level ten represents the ideal product and level one the worst (there is no zero scoring). Levels in between represent benchmarks of achievement on the path to the ideal.

Each product in the system is given a final score in each category. Pharos does not attempt to combine the individual category scores into a single overall numerical score for the product and does not encourage users to do this. Scores reflect qualitative relative benchmarks on the path to the category goal, not absolute quantitative assessments that are comparable across categories. The scores provide Pharos users with a fair evaluation of an unprecedented amount of information about a product or material “at-a-glance.”

But perhaps more importantly, Pharos also provides users with the data and the methodology behind the summary scores, allowing users to make their own conclusions. Clicking on a product’s category score will bring up a page that describes how the product was evaluated in that category. There are no black boxes in Pharos. All scoring protocols are available on the website. Click here to read more about the Pharos Framework that guides scoring. [hot link]

All Pharos calculations are completely transparent, all of our assumptions are disclosed, and as much raw data as possible is made available to Pharos users to allow them to make their own independent evaluation.

Why Is There No Combined, Averaged or Final Score For A Product ?

Combining or averaging scores from diverse attribute categories would be highly misleading. Consider two products with the exact opposite profiles. One product has low use of toxic chemicals and high percentage of recycled materials, while another has a low percentage of recycled materials and high use of toxic chemicals. Combining the scores would obscure the very real differences between the products, and make it harder for you to select a product that best aligned with your values. Assuming there is no product having both a low toxicity and high recycled content, your choice would reflect your own priorities. If you want to avoid the use of toxic chemicals, you would place a higher value on the first product. If you want to promote the use of recycled material, you would place a higher value on the second product. Or perhaps another variable would influence your thinking. More often than not, a product is neither an overwhelming winner nor an overwhelming loser. But products do have important differences in strengths and weaknesses. The multi-attribute scoring system allows you to align your choice with your values, and also allows manufacturers to see what areas of improvement could further distinguish their product.

Why Do No Products Earn Pharos’ highest score?

Most certifications and eco-labels rank products by virtue of how “not bad” they are — for example, which chemicals they don’t use or offgass. The highest score in those systems approximates the best practices of today. The highest score on the Pharos scale, “10” represents a product ideal (hotlink to page explaining ideal) that has not yet been reached, and measures how close a product is coming to that ideal in that particular category. In this way Pharos can help users see that even among products that achieve the same level of certification, some products have progressed further toward the ideal. This helps manufacturers who go “beyond compliance” to further distinguish their products and be rewarded for these efforts.

How Does Pharos Deal With Certified Products?

Pharos incorporates third party certification standards into its scoring criteria. Certified products start with the same base score on the Pharos scale. That score is based upon an alignment of the certification standard with Pharos criteria. The score may then be adjusted based on other criteria not covered by the standard. For example, in the category called “IAQ & other Toxic User Exposure,” products that have been certified to meet a California 01350 based standard for VOC emissions will all get the same base score. Some may then lose points for having other toxic content not addressed in the emissions standards.

Pharos offers users filters that can screen for products that meet established third party certification standards. But Pharos also allows users to differentiate among products that achieve third party certifications.

Where Does Pharos Get the Information It Uses for Evaluations?

Pharos information is most often obtained from the manufacturers through an RFI (request for information). The RFI is sent to manufacturers by the Healthy Building Network on behalf of Pharos users, and seeks information about products in a specific CSI category, for example Resilient Flooring, Division 09 65 00.

The electronic RFI directs manufacturers to the Pharos data entry site and provides a unique access code to the manufacturer. There, a representative of the company will go online to provide a variety of information about the company and its product, including recycled content, ingredients, the formulation and manufacturing process, manufacturing locations, certifications, regulatory compliance and standards met, renewable energy used at the manufacturing site, and packaging.

In some cases, Pharos obtains information needed to generate evaluations through in-house product research. This includes cases where manufacturers have declined to participate in Pharos but we feel that our users would benefit from access to the product information. Pharos in-house research is displayed differently than manufacturer supplied data to make it easy for the user to tell “at-a-glance” where the information in the system originated. For both RFI- and Pharos-generated research, sources for all data are required and accessible.

How Do I Use Pharos to Assess Products?

The Pharos scoring system gives a user a fair summary assessment “at-a-glance” of the relative impacts of products within CSI product categories. Rarely do these “at-a-glance” views reveal a product to be clearly superior to all others in all categories. Often, the Pharos scores reveal that products have different combinations of strengths and weaknesses. The “at-a-glance” will provide the Pharos subscriber with an unprecedented amount of information that they can use to align their product choices with their own values.

A Pharos subscriber may also use the system to examine the data directly in order to evaluate product attributes and chemical hazards. A Pharos user can also set filters based on scores or attributes, conduct searches and create product libraries that effectively let the user set her own priorities and preferences.

The Chemical and Materials Library is asking me for more detailed information about the name of a chemical. How do I get that information ?

In order to provide accurate information about chemical hazards, the Chemical and Materials Library requires that you enter the exact name of the chemical formula or its CAS Number (Chemical Abstracts Service). General chemical names, e.g. formaldehyde, or trade names do not provide accurate enough information about the chemical to properly evaluate it. Some chemicals pose far greater risks in one formula than they do in another. The CAS number is often contained on the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) of a product. This information is best obtained from the product manufacturer. It is important that product manufacturers know exactly which chemical formulation they are using, and disclose accurate information to their customers.

Can I use the Chemical and Material Library for products that are not in Pharos?

Yes, you can use the Chemical and Material Library as a stand-alone tool look up a chemical, polymer, metal, wood species or other material from any product and learn about any listed hazards for that material from the Pharos databases. The Chemical and Material Library can be a valuable tool that manufacturers can use to learn more about their supply chain.

Does Pharos Use Life Cycle Analysis ?

The Pharos system is strongly rooted in a life cycle thinking approach, emphasizing the importance of looking at impacts throughout the life cycle.

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is a term used broadly to apply to any of a number of quantitative analytic techniques to evaluate the environmental impact of a material or a service throughout its life cycle from extraction or harvesting of raw materials through processing, manufacture, installation, use and ultimate disposal or recycling. It does this by quantifying flows of materials, energy and pollutants and scaling impacts to these flows. Pharos is currently making use of qualitative information on chemical usage in manufacturing derived from inventory information collected for LCA use.

LCA can be an excellent tool for companies to use in evaluating some of their internal processes, but is not yet a mature analytic tool for comparison of different products across companies. LCA approaches and guidance vary widely and many important environmental and health impacts and attributes – such as the health impact of emerging chemicals of concern, for example – are not precisely quantifiable and scalable in the way needed for the mathematical models of LCA to capture. Efforts to quantify these data can mask inherent value judgments that can radically distort results, overemphasizing some impacts while totally hiding others. Paradoxically, LCA constraints may actually guide the user away from a good understanding of the full environmental health impacts and can lead to materials decisions that do not actually reflect the user’s environmental goals.

Pharos evaluates quantifiable data much like an LCA would and will likely utilize more LCA data as Pharos expands into more energy and climate assessment categories and as LCA improves. But Pharos importantly differs from LCA in also evaluating information that is not precisely quantifiable. We do so in a transparently qualitative manner so that you can see the standards we use and the assumptions we make.

How can I help build and improve the Pharos system?

The Pharos team is interested system in feedback from its subscribers through the comment system to continue to refine all phases of the Pharos tool and its scoring protocol. In the future, subscribers will be invited to join other stakeholders in dialogue groups to assist in developing additional evaluation criteria for products.

What Was The P3 Pilot Project?

During the summer of 2009, 18 of the nation’s leading architecture, design, construction and health care firms, along with a number of their suppliers, participated in the Healthy Building Network’s Pharos Pilot Project. Together, these partners helped test and refine tool you are using today.