Green Architecture & Building Products

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Material or Product

Portico

Building Materials Analysis and Decision-making Tool

Source

Portico is a web-based application designed to simplify the analysis, selection and specification of building products that meet health and transparency objectives. Portico allows the key participants in a building project such as owners, architects, contractors and manufacturers to collaborate, research and make actionable decisions on healthy building materials. Portico is a tool that will ensure that everyone - including low-and middle-income populations - has access to healthy materials.

Portico was developed by the Healthy Building Network team led by Chief Technology Officer Larry Kilroy, in collaboration with Google, to advance healthy materials use, accelerate access to high-quality and comparable data, and seamlessly connect supply with demand. Since 2015, Google has been using Portico to identify the healthiest products for its worldwide buildings, communicate Google priorities and inform product decisions that meets the healthy materials criteria and product scoring based on reliable and transparent manufacturer supplied data.

Portico is designed to integrate with a typical design and construction delivery process. It connects data with project workflow and has three main functions which are performed in the app: project management, product research and product information requests. Users can manage a building project by defining criteria, setting goals and tracking progress. The product library is continually growing, and as of October 2016 has more than 2,500 products.

Products are assessed against more than 40,000 chemical hazards sourced from Healthy Building Network’s Pharos Project, allowing users to search and compare materials for health and environmental hazard screening and certification information. Portico also connects manufacturers and their supply chain to their users, providing a direct communications channel to request and provide more detailed information about specific products, streamlining the communications process.