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iands.design editors spoke with Material Intelligence founder Kenn Busch about climate-positive materials in a far-ranging podcast. Host Robert Nieminen and Busch spoke about the impact that climate-positive materials have on human health, as well as sustainable choices, how to fight climate change, and how decorative laminates and composite woods can be great choices.
An excerpt from the transcript
Read the full transcript at iands.designRobert: Okay. Well, as I mentioned in my introduction, Kenn, you know this better than anybody, material product choices do have a direct impact on climate change and human health. And so, for our listeners out there, can you maybe elaborate a little bit on how those two are interrelated? Because I’m not sure everybody always makes that connection.
Kenn: There’s a lot of conversations now about how the compounds that people are using to try and clean their environments, whether it’s constantly spraying alcohol on your hands and on the shopping cart, handles and whatnot. That is obviously a great way to take every precaution.
But the idea that we are now surrounding ourselves with these pretty extreme compounds, and everybody’s talking as well about chemicals of concern. And that’s not just what’s built into products, it’s what we use to clean and maintain them. The idea that perhaps we can start using more materials applied on more surfaces that can be just cleaned with a very simple soap and water or vinegar, rather than Butadiene or some of these higher defense grid cleaning compounds.
That is a great way to reduce the amount of chemistry you are subjecting your human organism to when you’re in a space. So, the idea—and I hate to draw this analogy, but there are some parallels to the agricultural industry creating plant hybrids that are more resistant to pesticides. We aren’t getting quite that far. That’s like the far end of the extreme, but there are materials that are being developed to be cleaned as well as they can be cleaned by anything with the use of very simple solutions…
Robert: Without the use of a hazmat suit for the cleaning.
Kenn: Right, we don’t need a breathing apparatus or have to go into quarantine after hosing down our desktops.
