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Healthy Materials Lab
132 Plays4 years ago
GUEST / JONSARA RUTH / HEALTHY MATERIALS LAB
- https://healthymaterialslab.org/
- https://healthymaterialslab.org/learning-hub/e-learning-online-certificate-program
- https://healthymaterialslab.org/learning-hub/the-affordable-housing-guide-program
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/healthy-materials-lab/
- https://www.facebook.com/healthymaterialslab/
- https://www.instagram.com/healthymaterialslab/
- https://www.saltylabs.us/
- The New Coal - Plastics & Climate Change, by Beyond Plastics
HOST / MATT MORLEY / WELLBEING CHAMPION
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 42
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to episode 42 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast focused on wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and interiors. I'm your host, Matt Morley, a wellbeing champion and founder of Biophilico Healthy Buildings.
Meet John-Sara Ruth
00:00:24
Speaker
This week, we're in New York talking to John-Sara Ruth, co-founder and design director of the Healthy Materials Lab and an associate professor at the Parsons School of Design.
00:00:35
Speaker
John Sara received the Masters of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in industrial design from Rhode Island School of Design. She also has her own healthy materials design collective called Salty Labs.
Mission of the Healthy Materials Lab
00:00:48
Speaker
The Healthy Materials Lab, meanwhile, is all about placing health at the center of real estate architecture and interiors. They aim to raise awareness around toxics in building products and create educational online resources for designers and architects that further that same cause. I recently completed their four-part online certification program to become
00:01:09
Speaker
healthy materials advocate and I honestly can't recommend the course enough whether you work in this industry or you're just simply curious to understand more about buildings and the materials that go into them both the good and the bad it's far easier not to look under the hood right to just trust that developers
00:01:26
Speaker
architects and contractors all have our best interests at heart.
Harmful Chemicals in Homes
00:01:30
Speaker
Well, I hate to burst the bubble, but that just ain't so. Nowhere is this more acute than in our homes, our offices and, as John Czara explains, the worst offender of all, the affordable housing sector.
00:01:43
Speaker
She speaks with the precision of a well-proven professor and the conviction of someone with a very clear mission in life. So listen up, people. This is a good one. If you enjoyed the episode, please hit like or subscribe for next week's release. Here's John Sauer Ruth. Well, listen, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. Could we start with a quick description of the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons and what its main objectives are?
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah, sure. It's great to be here, Matt. Thanks for inviting us here. And I'm happy to represent our fantastic team of collaborators at the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons. Our central objective, really, is to remove harmful chemicals from the built environment that are prohibiting people from living healthy lives. That's the big, big picture.
00:02:37
Speaker
believe that we as designers and architects and building professionals, if we can put people in the center of our minds when we make every design decision, people and environmental health at the center,
00:02:51
Speaker
then that changes the way we think about design and it also puts people's health and environmental health at the forefront. That means that it changes the way we think about building products in the environment and changes the way we think about the whole process of designing.
00:03:10
Speaker
Our specific focus is on affordable housing and people living in affordable housing. So that's kind of our objective. And the way that we do that is that we provide education to designers and to architects and building professionals and faculty who are teaching the next generation of designers and architects so that they can understand how to design healthier buildings and homes.
Educational Resources for Healthier Buildings
00:03:38
Speaker
So we do that with courses. We develop courses, short courses, and also programs that allow professionals to use these programs as their continuing education credits.
00:03:54
Speaker
so that they can build this right into their practice. So we have two robust online programs. One is specifically about affordable housing and the other one is more generally for anyone who is interested in the built environment at making it healthy. We also provide resources and tools and examples for designers and architects to make
00:04:17
Speaker
to make it simpler to build healthier. And I think you and I are talking a little earlier just about how complicated it can be. And so a lot of the work that we're doing is to translate information from examples, but also from other disciplines, disciplines other than design, into actionable knowledge within the building industry. So there's a lot of work being done about the toxics included in building products. And a lot of that work is happening in science.
00:04:47
Speaker
or in public health or in material research or in environmental justice advocacy. And so we are constantly culling from all of these different perspectives and interpreting that
00:05:04
Speaker
to be useful knowledge for people who are designers and architects. And then putting it into, hopefully into really easily accessible devices through our website and through live events and through recorded education programs to make it just accessible for anybody.
Transforming the Building Industry
00:05:25
Speaker
Our goal is to really make radical change in the building industry so that everyone can live healthier lives.
00:05:32
Speaker
It really can be like opening Pandora's box. Once one starts to get into this, there's so much to understand and so much to look into. Having resources of expertise becomes fundamental. We need access to the right information and getting to the best possible answer as quickly as possible, and it can be overwhelming.
00:05:54
Speaker
But if we take a step back, just for perhaps those who are less aware of the risks and dangers of toxic chemicals in our built environment, in the buildings around us, what are the main sources of those chemicals? How are they released into the air? And what are the risks at stake in these unhealthy buildings and interiors?
History and Impact of Building Materials
00:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the sources can be anything in the built environment. Basically, our world is made up of materials. We live in a physical world that is made up of materials. And the way we sometimes think about it is, I don't know, I like to think about it historically. If we look thousands of years ago, people were building shelter out of what was right around them.
00:06:46
Speaker
trees or clay or stone or water, you know, and mixing, mixing in a plant life, and they were mixing these things together to make shelter in the Industrial Revolution when, when there's this huge surge in manmade synthetic
00:07:07
Speaker
products that are primarily based in the fossil fuel industry, there was all this kind of discovery about how to make synthetic products act a little bit more like natural products and do it quickly and do it without much regulation. And so what it turns out is that the building products that we primarily build with now, we meaning globally,
00:07:36
Speaker
contain chemicals that are often very toxic to human bodies. And they can be found in almost every building product in a conventionally built building. And that can range from flooring materials to wall materials, insulation, even to the paint that's just around us on the interior. We look at like an interior, I don't know, I'm sitting in a space right now, and the walls, the ceilings,
00:08:05
Speaker
all four walls and the ceilings, that's five surfaces of the room are painted with what we call a latex paint, but it's not latex at all. It's really a synthetic, it's acrylic, which is plastic. And so we often think about it like we're living almost in a plastic bag. And so that's just an example to use paint, but almost every single material that's used in the built environment is
00:08:35
Speaker
is a product and that product is a list. If you look at the product's ingredients, like you might look at the list of ingredients in a package of food, a food product, you'll see a long list of ingredients. And a lot of those ingredients are chemicals that have been traced. And now there's been research in the last 25 years to look at those ingredients that are in building products and identify the link to human disease.
00:09:05
Speaker
And it turns out that a lot of these chemicals are linked to challenging human diseases as common as asthma or diabetes, even obesity.
00:09:17
Speaker
or even nerve disorders like the nervous system, like autism or different kinds of attention disorder in children are linked to some of these chemicals. And then of course there's carcinogens and hormone disruptors. So there's a long list of effects that these chemicals that are found in building products can have on human bodies.
00:09:44
Speaker
And especially vulnerable are children because their organs are growing. And if they're exposed to these chemicals while their organs are developing, then their whole bodily system is affected. Or older people who have immune compromised systems are overly affected. Or pregnant women are gestating fetuses who could be affected. So the effects are long
00:10:11
Speaker
you know, there's a long list of people who are more affected. And then I think you asked like, how do these,
00:10:22
Speaker
chemicals get released into the atmosphere, they can be released through different things. They can be released through VOCs, Volatile Organic Compounds, or SVOCs, which are gaseous. They can be emitted. They're invisible gases that release into the indoor environments, and then we breathe them in. That's probably one of the most common ways that we
00:10:45
Speaker
can be affected, our bodies can be affected through inhalation. But they can also, you know, materials decompose over time and as they decompose they have like microscopic particles that move into the air and cling on to dust and that dust can also be inhaled or
00:11:07
Speaker
It actually can even be ingested if we're eating and our mouths are open. We're eating something. We're sitting on a sofa. There's a little bit of dust on the sofa that gets onto our pizza. We put the pizza in our mouth. Or some kinds of chemicals actually can be absorbed through the skin.
00:11:25
Speaker
So Bisphenol A, for example, has been found on, I think this might be true in Europe as well, although I'm not sure, but in America on cash register receipts, there's Bisphenol A. And if the people in the grocery store are
00:11:44
Speaker
Are more vulnerable than all of us cuz they touch them every minute but if we. Touch that cash register receipt we can absorb that this finally through our skin. Which then access an endocrine receptor you know what hormone disrupt in our body so.
00:11:59
Speaker
I don't know, this all sounds like a horror movie, but a lot of this is invisible. And that's why it's really important for us to know more, and especially as designers and architects, to know enough to not include these chemicals and these materials that contain these chemicals in the buildings that we're designing.
Interrelation of Human and Environmental Health
00:12:25
Speaker
This is where we start to build up the argument for how one can improve and do better than has been done in the past and then you get into the healthy buildings argument. But we have, I think, to define one piece that you mentioned around people and environmental health or our health as humans.
00:12:45
Speaker
and the health of the environment and the planet around us. Can one draw a line between the two? Is there in fact no clear distinction between them? How do you think about that relationship between people and planet as it relates to healthy materials?
00:13:07
Speaker
I think it's all related. It's impossible to separate because the way we think about this is through the full life cycle of a material. So if we're thinking about, well, let's think about what we've been focused on lately and I'm kind of obsessed with this material because it's one of the fastest growing building materials in the United States is
00:13:37
Speaker
Luxury Vinyl Tile, LVT.
00:13:41
Speaker
So, if we look at LVT from the very origins of that material, I mean, it's a product. And by a product, I mean it's made up of many different materials. Different from wood, for instance, which is, if you have a piece of timber, that's from a tree. It's very clear that that's wood. But if you have LVT, it's made up of many different materials. And there's some great research which traced
00:14:07
Speaker
all the different materials, which are really polyvinyl chloride. So we're looking at chloride and we're looking at vinyl and where all those things come from and tracing them back to their origins. We find that just in the mining of chloride and in the manufacturing of vinyl, there are environmental
00:14:29
Speaker
Impacts that are extremely harmful to the environment, but also extremely harmful to anyone living near those facilities. So if we think about where plastics are or where petroleum, let's say like fossil fuels are refined.
00:14:45
Speaker
There are communities who unfortunately have not much choice about where they live and their housing is located right next to these refineries. And so those people are exposed to the plastics refinery on a daily basis, 24 hours a day.
00:15:02
Speaker
There's one example where there's a link between the environmental pollution, which is obviously polluting the environment, polluting the land and soil and water systems. It's also emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, which we know is
00:15:22
Speaker
a major emitter of greenhouse gases, which then go on to cause climate change. And we are suffering the effects of that right now. And then there's the people who are living right there next to that factory who are affected by that same air pollution. And then if that LVT makes it into their homes, then they're affected by the chemicals that make LVT pliable, soft, they're the phthalates
00:15:48
Speaker
and other kinds of chemical classes that are in plastics, and now they're in their homes. If we think through that process, and it's really just following our imagination, how is something made? Where is it made? What does it affect? You can see how climate change, environmental health, and people's health are completely interrelated. There's no way to separate them.
00:16:18
Speaker
There's this great report that just came out in October called plastics, I think it's called the new coal. Yeah, it's called plastics are the new coal and it's put out by
00:16:31
Speaker
an organization called Beyond Plastics. But the summary of their findings show that plastics production might be even more negative impact on the climate than even burning of coal.
Impact of Plastics on Climate and Health
00:16:46
Speaker
And the plastics production is a lot about building materials. It's a lot about making the places that we live.
00:16:55
Speaker
So, um, which then go on to negatively affect our human health, like we talked about before, they can be, they can disrupt our hormone systems as well as disrupt the climate, the atmosphere. So yeah, that's maybe a long-winded way to say environmental health, people's health, climate health is all completely, you know, woven together.
00:17:19
Speaker
It's a false dichotomy. In other words, we're using this people and planet as if they were somehow two separate concepts. But in fact, if you just accept that we're all part of nature, then I often think of biophilia and nature in a way as being the bridge between those two, between people and planet. Once you accept that, once you see the bigger picture of us all really just being part of a natural world, then there is no distinction between one and the other. If we then look at how
00:17:47
Speaker
the practical realities of integrating some of these concerns into the design process. When we're talking about real estate developers, architects, and designers who are then giving health, both human and environmental, a seat at the table so that then becomes part of the design process of building or refurbishing.
00:18:11
Speaker
In terms of how that pans out, how is that getting done? Is it having a consultant on the team? Is it about architects retraining or re-educating themselves? How are you seeing that playing out in the day-to-day terms?
00:18:29
Speaker
I think it's all of those things. I think it is a lot about architects and designers getting more knowledge than was typically taught in schools up to a couple of years ago. I think that what we're doing at Parsons is to develop curriculum and
00:18:50
Speaker
and courses to help educate architects and designers and the next generation of architects and designers to understand their choices much better. So that's beginning. But in terms of professionals who are building buildings now, there's more education necessary and it takes time.
00:19:12
Speaker
We're involved in that effort to educate professionals to know better, but we also know that the process of building a building and the day-to-day demands upon an architect or a designer are so extreme that often consultants are needed because this takes time. It takes time to examine our choices more carefully, and that's what's necessary.
00:19:37
Speaker
I think a lot of buildings are built and then the next building comes across the table and you say, well, it worked well in that last building, so let's just use it again. And so there's not a lot of examination of our choices. But if we think about using healthier building products and making healthier buildings, we actually do have to examine our past experience and our past choices and we need to examine it pretty closely. And so that is where
00:20:06
Speaker
I think consultants come
Role of Architects and Designers
00:20:08
Speaker
in. I think we're also seeing that larger architecture and design firms are beginning to hire in-house experts in material health. A lot of our students, our graduate students, and our researchers who've worked with us at the lab then move on to work in architecture and design firms, and they become the resident expert.
00:20:30
Speaker
Anna and that's necessary because the research of building materials is. Is not so straightforward it's not.
00:20:39
Speaker
It takes time. It takes time. And, you know, of course there are credentials to achieve. You know, there are Bream in Europe, there's LEED, there's WELL, there's all these different certifying bodies which help people navigate the system. But some of those criteria I would say maybe are not aggressive enough. And so it's really important for folks to have knowledge, not just follow guidelines.
00:21:09
Speaker
And so I'm not saying that that's not useful. A bunch of our colleagues have even changed in the US what's called the enterprise green communities criteria, which is a very aggressive criteria for building affordable housing to be healthier and less negatively impactful on the environment. And so there's some great headway that's happening, but there is deep knowledge necessary for designers and architects and for consultants.
00:21:39
Speaker
I think that's one of the things that took from the four part online certification course of yours is that you didn't shy away from just showing how complex and thorny this whole process is and sort of really exposing that and being completely transparent about it rather than trying to.
00:22:00
Speaker
sort of write the textbook and say, well, look, just read this and everything will be okay, which is arguably what happens a little bit with some of these courses around green and healthy building certifications that I've been sort of quietly collecting over the last few years. And to be honest with your course, it was the first time where I felt there was a much more human approach that was much more grounded in the realities of this, which is it's complex stuff. It's hard. It's not,
00:22:26
Speaker
Easy. So with that course then, who's your main audience? Who are you focusing on with the four-part online certificate course? And then we can loop around onto the affordable housing one, which I think is really interesting, separate topic.
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's really directed, well, primarily directed at designers and architects, but also at anyone in the building industry, because we know that contractors, for instance, and developers and owners of buildings, even maintenance workers, have a huge impact on the way that building is built and the way that building is maintained. And so anyone involved in making choices
00:23:06
Speaker
for the building products or materials used in buildings are the potential students of this course. The big objective is just like you said, for people to understand that it's not straightforward, that it takes real thought. We have to weigh our choices. We have to make compromises always.
00:23:31
Speaker
make priorities about buildings. What we're trying to do is educate a way of thinking. We call it material health thinking. Architects and design professionals have been taking our course and it's been fabulous. We're seeing, at least locally in the US,
00:23:51
Speaker
that we're watching practices actually shift to healthier ways of building, which is phenomenal. Our next frontier is really to provide education that's appealing to contractors, because at the contractor level, that's where a lot of substitutions happen. An architect and designer can write in a specification for a healthier building product.
00:24:16
Speaker
But then there might not be the money and then the owner might say, well, we can't spend that much and then the contractor will say, well, we'll just substitute it for this.
Education for Contractors and Workers
00:24:25
Speaker
And all of a sudden you've lost your healthier building, or at least you've lost strides on that. So that's our next frontier is to really recruit more
00:24:39
Speaker
more contractors and more maintenance folks in buildings to take these courses, and even developers to take the courses. It's a real lesson that one. I can't tell you how many times this happened to me, not just necessarily around the health credentials of a material, but just not quite maintaining that final 10% to 20% control of exactly what goes in.
00:25:02
Speaker
And then it's too late by the time you realize that something's been been switched and how did that get there and you just it's some it's a real challenge so i think that's very interesting you're focusing on that let's talk about affordable housing could you mentioned it and obviously there's the course related to it and.
00:25:20
Speaker
Just to give us a context there, what is it about affordable housing that makes it such an acute problem in terms of the health or negative poor health credentials of these buildings? What are the main hazards you're finding there?
Challenges in Affordable Housing Materials
00:25:34
Speaker
I mean, you know, one of maybe the most obvious reasons is because affordable housing is generally built with cheap materials. And those cheap materials are generally the most unhealthy. Most of the cheap materials that are available today are synthetics, are based in plastics, based in this like refinement of fossil fuels, which then are made into, you know, particular, you know,
00:26:04
Speaker
you know, little particle materials that are then made into the building products. And those are the ones, you know, if you can find something that's a dollar a square foot, well, let's use it for the poor people in affordable housing. And that's the thinking process. And we are trying to change that.
00:26:19
Speaker
And to say actually we need to use healthier materials for people who don't have a choice about where they live because like I said earlier, often these are folks who are doubly or triply exposed.
00:26:38
Speaker
their homes might be located near factories or near toxic waste dumps or near highways where there's just a lot of exterior pollution and then they go inside and their flooring is polluting their house too and so is their cabinetry and so are their
00:26:56
Speaker
The walls of their their home are polluting the indoor so they're being polluted in their external life and in their interior spaces and then often also people who are living in affordable housing are working in factories and they're working in.
00:27:12
Speaker
Unconstruction sites and they're working in places where they're exposed all day long to harmful chemicals and then some of those chemicals are on their Their clothing and then they bring that clothing home and then the children in that household are exposed doubly or triply
00:27:27
Speaker
So that's the reason we focus because we focus on affordable housing because people who are living in affordable housing have all kinds of more risks and hazards of being exposed to harmful chemicals than others. So it's really important that at least we build homes for low-income people that are
00:27:50
Speaker
Are i'm healthier let's start there and you. Try to give everyone a chance to live a thriving healthy life you know i think there's so many examples of high high incidences of asthma and diabetes.
00:28:08
Speaker
until recently we attributed that to exterior air pollution or to diet or to different, or we even think of obesity, we attribute it to poor eating habits. But increasingly what we're finding is that the chemicals that are used in building products might affect these diseases even more. And there is people who live in rental housing have no control over those building materials.
00:28:37
Speaker
So that's why we focus specifically on affordable housing and the more the contractors and the architects and the designers understand this, I think it's a compelling argument to change. It was a real eye opener for me, I think.
00:28:56
Speaker
I'll be very honest, I think probably I've been guilty of falling into what is in retrospect a fairly sort of white middle-class privileged perspective on what I do, which is trying to help in my own way to create healthier interiors. And it's far easier to have those conversations on premium new build or high-end refurbishment projects in center of London,
00:29:19
Speaker
with big pension funds behind us and plenty of cash. There's still topics of discussion and debate around budgets and how we manage things, but the numbers are on a completely different scale. That piece of your course really brought it home to me and it was kind of a light bulb moment. I just thought, oh gosh, wow, there's this whole other side to this debate, which is, okay, how do you make that happen when
00:29:45
Speaker
there aren't these big budgets available. And how does one make progress and improve on that situation when the money is so tight? And surely that must be the biggest challenge then if you're advocating for healthy materials, but still within that affordable housing sector. So how do you crack that?
Strategies for Healthier Materials
00:30:05
Speaker
Is there necessarily a price differential? Are there options available if one has the knowledge to improve things? Or is there always an impact on the bottom line?
00:30:16
Speaker
That's a really great question. And that's where we dig into the details. I mean, that's where we really have to dig into the strategy for building a building and the financing for building a building. And there are strategies and there's some proven strategies that have worked really well, which is well, some is redirecting funds to materials, you know, adding a little bit of material and a little bit of budget to material costs. And what we're finding is that actually material costs is
00:30:38
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:30:47
Speaker
less of an issue than labor costs anyway and other kinds of costs to doing building, but it's the easiest one to value engineer out, which is why it's always the first to go. But if this knowledge is brought to the table, then there are other ways to think about those budgets. So it really becomes more of an economic issue and an issue with folks in the
00:31:10
Speaker
Now the white color folks in the office is like rethinking how they're they're aligning their budget. So that's one thing the other
00:31:20
Speaker
Another strategy has been mass procurement. So for instance, if there's a developer who's building housing in five different cities, and there's an architecture designer who's specifying the materials in those cities, and we go to, we, meaning, I guess, because we sometimes work with these architects and designers. But if they specify a particular flooring material, for instance,
00:31:49
Speaker
in each of those five buildings over a thousand units rather than maybe a hundred units, then the price differential goes way down. And then you can work it out with the manufacturer who will lower the cost. And so then it becomes much more cost competitive. So there's different kinds of strategies that are used in order to achieve the use of healthier materials in affordable housing.
00:32:17
Speaker
It's not unachievable. In fact, it's beginning to happen. I spoke to a manufacturer today actually who does create a healthier flooring and he is very eager to get into the affordable housing market. Not only because it will feel good and because he believes in it as a mission,
00:32:37
Speaker
But because it's a big market, there's huge, huge amounts of housing that need to be built to match the population growth, the exponential population growth that we are going to experience in the next 10, 20 and 30 years. I mean, massive amounts of building have to be built. And so it's a large housing and especially affordable housing is a very, very big market.
Optimism and Economic Drivers for Change
00:33:04
Speaker
When you look, say 10 years down the line from where you're at today and considering where we've got to, what has been done and what has yet to be done, are you optimistic for the future? What do you see as being the largest hurdles to be overcome? Do you have an overall sense of things going in the right direction, at least within your local or regional market there in the US? That's a funny question, isn't it? We're suffering through such hard times right now.
00:33:33
Speaker
We are all, I don't know, our workplace closed again today like we did in 2020. And there's so much hardship really. And we think about the climate crisis and the challenges that we need to overcome in order to slow the temperature rise. And so there's so much to say that we shouldn't be optimistic.
00:33:59
Speaker
But I can't afford not to be optimistic. I'm an optimist. Otherwise, I think I couldn't do this work. I am an optimist, and I do believe that we can make the shift. And I think, like you're saying, more people who understand, who've taken the course or who understand the issues
00:34:17
Speaker
are inspired to make change. They are not discouraged. I see the opposite. I see more and more people being inspired to make change and taking on the challenge of what that means. And again, this conversation I had earlier today with a manufacturer who shares the optimism, making a floor out of plants, basically, making the floor out of flaxseed oil, out of linseed oil,
00:34:46
Speaker
And saying you know what this change can happen this change can happen and because of manufacturers like that who are Who are you know really rigorous about what kinds of? ingredients they're putting into their flooring materials and what kind of ingredients they will absolutely never include because they believe in environmental health they believe in people's health and ultimately they believe in
00:35:14
Speaker
the global health of all citizens. So I think that's a poster child for a manufacturer. And then we have many, many designers and architects who are thinking along the same line. So I do believe we can change. I do. But it's a scramble every day for us to make more people aware
00:35:38
Speaker
that they can make these changes and then they can make more compassionate, knowledgeable, helpful choices so that we can reduce emissions, that we can make healthier housing, that we can have less impact on the water and soil and on the waste production and work together. Like you said earlier, to understand the symbiosis between people and nature and
00:36:06
Speaker
our atmosphere and start making choices that put that in more higher regard. So I am optimistic. I think there's also been more and more economic arguments for the same, which I think political and economic arguments often drive change. And so I think there's
00:36:28
Speaker
becoming more and more legislation also. But we really, as designers and architects, can make these changes that can have mass impact in the most positive way. I like it. I think we should end on an inspirational high note.
00:36:46
Speaker
Thank you so much. It's been really, really insightful. Thank you for your time. We will link to the course in the show notes. How do you typically recommend people to engage? Website, obviously your main way in. Do you do LinkedIn, Instagram? What are your channels?
00:37:02
Speaker
All of them, yeah, healthymaterialslab.org is our website. And on the Learning Hub, you can find the courses where you can register. The registration is through the New School, which is where Parsons School of Design is housed and where Healthy Materials Lab is housed. We're also on LinkedIn and on Instagram and on Facebook. Our handle is at healthymaterialslab. And so you can find us at all those places. Actually, if you can
00:37:31
Speaker
You can even just Google Healthy Materials Lab and it will come up and we have all kinds of resources for you to dabble into.
00:37:39
Speaker
So yeah, I hope more folks join us there. Come to our website, you'll find, in addition to our courses, you'll find examples of healthier materials that you can specify. You can find tools and resources that will help you get there faster and ultimately a four course program which will give you all this knowledge that Madis is mentioning after having taken the course.
00:38:05
Speaker
So actually registration is open now through the end of January for the course. And then it will close and not open again until the summer. So if you're listening, I encourage you to register now for the course at healthymaterialslap.org. Very cool. Brilliant. Thanks again for your time. Thank you, Matt.