Profile: David Baggs

David Baggs wants GreenTag to be globally recognised as a leading edge indicator of a products’ ability to contribute to a healthy future for the planet. His company ecospecifier global launched the new generation eco-label for building products at Green Cities in Melbourne this week.  He believes Green Tag will enable consumers and the building industry to easily identify products which are healthier for the planet and healthier for us. He was interviewed by Graham Readfearn for abc carbon express.

Certifying Sustainable Designs and Products with a GreenTag:

David Baggs continues to make his mark on green buildings

By Graham Readfearn for abc carbon express (23 February 2010):

ACCORDING to David Baggs each bit of wood in the door of his office has impacted the environment in 241 different ways.

“For example, you look at the energy it took to make the door. You ask how durable the timber is,’’ he says.

“Did the wood come from a sustainable source? How was it harvested and what was the waste and energy from that process.’’

Needless to say Baggs, the CEO of environmental certification company Ecospecifier, is a man who is big on what some might regard as minor details.

With a distinguished career in sustainable architecture and building consultancy, Baggs has been at the forefront of sustainability in the building industry during a career which has spanned four decades.

When many architects in the 1980s were working out how to build office blocks and domestic homes quickly and cheaply, Baggs was a leading expert on earth-covered houses and designs that harnessed renewable energy.

While the world was waiting for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Baggs was working behind the scenes with developers to make sure the venues were built sustainably.

Now, the company he founded with business and life partner Mary-Lou Kelly is launching a new generation eco-label for building products called GreenTag which, he believes, will enable consumers and the building industry across the globe to easily identify products which are healthier for the planet and healthier for us.

 “We all live on a planet that’s under huge stress,’’ says the Brisbane-based father of two. “The longer that we ignore the problems of unmitigated and unqualified consumption, the faster we dig our own grave.”

If that sounds like the statement of a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist, then it’s because that is just what Baggs is.

His affinity for the environment can be traced back to childhood holidays at Lake Conjola, south of Sydney, where the knee-high Baggs spent time at his grandparents’ holiday home.

“It was a beautiful unspoilt spot – it felt like a wilderness at the time – and we’d walk, catch fish and just have wonderful holidays,’’ he remembers.

But as a teenager taking part in nuclear disarmament marches and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, he got a growing sense that in terms of how civilisation was influencing the planet “we were getting things wrong’’.

Now Ecospecifier’s new GreenTag scheme could be the chance for his own industry to start getting things right.

After graduating from the NSW Institute of Technology, Baggs took a special interest in earth-covered and healthy homes, taking a cue from his “inspirational” late-father Dr Sydney Baggs, an architect, landscape architect and university lecturer who was a leading-light in the technology in Australia and the world.

“After you have finished building an earth-covered home, you put the nature back. They are part of the natural systems,’’ says Baggs.

“I remember doing manual calculations that would take four days, just to get an idea of the heat-loss in the buildings in different rooms at different times of the year. I researched, researched and researched.’’

Understanding how building materials affected the environment, led him to work directly with developers building venues for the Sydney Olympics.

During that time, he remembers one triumph in persuading the builder of the SuperDome (now the Acer Arena) to stick with a plan to use fibre from 250,000 recycled telephone directories as sound insulation.

It was a safer, simpler, more efficient, less toxic and faster way to insulate the building, but as the developers hadn’t used the material before, Baggs realised they would need some convincing.

“Builders are incredibly risk averse. Seeing it from their point of view, they need information before they can put a product in,’’ he says.

“I got the manufacturer to test it and give us the results. In the end, the builder used it and saved six weeks on construction and ended up with a more successful building – it added two hours daily to its noise licence.

“It was that experience that pointed out to me what kind of information the building industry really needed about materials.’’

After the Olympics, Baggs had gathered life-cycle assessments for hundreds of building products. But it was his partner Mary-Lou’s idea to use that information as a starting point for Ecospecifier.

Ecospecifier began verifying the quality of eco-building materials in 2002 and GreenTag, launching at the Asia-Pacific-wide Green Cities Conference in Melbourne (21 – 24 February) is now a prime focus for the business.

Even before the product has been launched, Baggs says there are at least 170 products which manufacturers have said they would like to be assessed.

GreenTag, he explains, has two elements. The first is a simple logo which manufacturers can apply to have placed on their environmentally friendlier building product, ranking eco-credentials bronze, silver, gold and platinum.

But the true strength of GreenTag is in the second element; the complex, detailed and globally accredited cradle-to-grave life-cycle assessments of the environmental impacts of those products. The GreenTag badge is the visual icing on the cake.

Under GreenTag, each door, window frame, light fitting, piece of timber, floor covering, paint product or any other building material can be assessed against six summary criteria – each including potentially hundreds of other indicators and thousands of individual assessments.

The six criteria cover issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, health risks of pollutants, impacts on biodiversity and the health and welfare of workers together with social benefits.

“We look at every single component that’s in the product and put that through an assessment process and look at the risks and benefits associated with each of those components.’’

For the consumer, the builder, the architect or the developer who wants to make the right environmental choice, GreenTag should make it both easy and environmentally sound.

“If you look at what’s happening in the industry and people’s purchasing decisions, the research is showing clearly that if you give people the information about the products they’re buying, then they will act on it,’’ says Baggs.

“What’s clear as well is that without that information, they can’t make those decisions. This kind of information is critical in empowering people to make their own decisions. We put power back into the hands of the people buying the products to make an informed choice quickly and simply.’’

Depending on the complexity of the product, Baggs says it should take between two and six months for Ecospecifier to award a GreenTag, with a standard cost for each product of $7,000.

“Our bronze GreenTag is the equivalent or better – in terms of what a product needs to gain it – than other labels in the market.

“For a product to get a Platinum rating, you are going to know that there’s nothing on the market that’s any healthier or more eco-friendly.”

Baggs hopes to release GreenTag internationally before the year is out. He is also applied to align a major component of GreenTag called ‘GreenRate’ with Australia’s Green Building Council methods of star-rating buildings.

Already, GreenTag has gained compliance with six different international standards (ISO) relating to the quality of the life-cycle assessments, greenhouse gas calculations and product labelling.

Baggs acknowledges that any accreditation scheme is only as good as the organisation which administers it (and the standards they adhere to), so he has invited risk management consultants Det Norske Veritas (DNV) to externally audit the GreenTag process.

Baggs adds: “I want GreenTag to be globally recognised as a leading edge indicator of a products’ ability to contribute to a healthy future for the planet.’’

Graham Readfearn is a Brisbane based independent multi-media journalist and award winning feature writer with 15 years experience in the United Kingdom and Australia in newspapers (Courier Mail and Yorkshire Post), magazines, radio (BBC) and online, most recently writing a provocative environment blog for News Limited across Australia.

Source: www.abccarbon.com and www.ecospecifier.org