Building Alive, Designing to Thrive

MSDS stands for: Material Safety Data Sheet It is intended to provide workers with all vital information about a product they are handling: melting point, boiling point, toxicity, first aid, etc. Most final products (like a refrigerator) do not require an MSDS. Chemicals and products in liquid form usually do. A safety data sheet is not intended for the final consumer - more for the person installing or working with the product in an occupational setting. Every country has different standards for what must be explored and declared on an MSDS. The EU, for example requires more ecotoxicity information than the US. And Canada considers different chemicals mandatory for listing. Of course all nations permit proprietary withholding to protect a company’s recipe. In the US, OSHA oversees MSDS creation and so it is OSHA I pick a fight with now. In pursuing the Living Building Challenge, every product that we put in our structure needs to be vetted to ensure it incl...

Seems like some kind of oxymoron, doesn't it? But in order to create a new building lots of papers get signed, sent, edited, resent, negotiated, resent, signed, copied, and filed. Some standard papers that you'll see in any construction project include: permits, site plans, blueprints, contracts, and something called Masterspec- which I just became intimately acquainted with a couple of weeks ago. Masterspec is an 80-page booklet- just for the table of contents- titling all the different categories of stuff that are involved in building. So, it became a dandy little project when my boss asked me to take all of our researched materials and cross file them: First by contractor item then by Masterspec ID number. I didn't even know there was such an official book. So for example, now you see folders that say: Concrete, Grout, Steel, etc. Then when you pull out grout there is a label on the front that says: 03 60 00: Grouting. Beyond being helpful in specifically filing things-...