At Google, we are committed to creating the healthiest work environment possible and using building products that promote human and environmental health and transparency. Inspired by this challenge, we have been making great strides toward giving everyone access to the information needed to understand human and environmental impacts of materials so we can make healthy decisions backed by science. This means you can know all the ingredients of every product in your environment──from the chair you are sitting in, to the paint you purchased for your living room──just like the nutrition labels on the food you buy at your neighborhood grocery store.
While a robust framework for gathering product information is important; it is also critical to build processes and tools that can be used to select and specify healthy materials. Embracing this challenge to serve the scale at which Google operates resulted in the creation of Portico, an online web application that Google developed in partnership with non-profit partner Healthy Building Network (HBN).
Since 2015, Google has been testing Portico on internal design and construction projects and using it to establish and communicate the company’s values and priorities around human health, informing decisions that meet Google’s healthy materials criteria, and product scoring based on reliable and transparent manufacturer supplied data. To-date, we have used Portico on over 195 projects in 20 countries and over 1,500 project team members and 5,000 manufacturers participating, contributing to a growing database of over 2,500 products that have satisfied Google’s healthy material requirements.