Healthy Building Network recently demo’d our approach to product research for the Community of Practice team in Seattle.  In preparation for the call, we reviewed product literature for a vinyl sheet floor that had been specified for their demonstration project, and matched that against our “stoplight” ranking of healthy flooring materials.

In doing so, we realized that for some products, the gap between the technical information disclosed in product literature, and the general guidance we provided in our ranking was too wide.  For our HomeFree colleagues to be successful doing product research on their own, we needed to connect some dots.

Thus was born a “cheat sheet” for interpreting product literature for vinyl products.  

We hope that this will be a resource at the ready, when reviewing potential vinyl products for construction projects.  And, when a manufacturer discloses that its vinyl sheet floor is made with “Dioctyl Terephthalate (DOTP),” for example, you can consult your cheat sheet and confirm that this plasticizer is an improvement over plasticizers historically used in PVC.