California-based Charles Pankow Foundation has awarded a $153,000 grant to support CSI (Construction Specifications Institute) Foundation’s continued
California-based Charles Pankow Foundation has awarded a $153,000 grant to support CSI (Construction Specifications Institute) Foundation’s continued development of GreenFormat, a new template enabling manufacturers to accurately report products’ sustainability-enhancing properties. CSI will use the funds to solicit industry feedback, revise and refine the draft version of the Format, upgrade the web site and database, and bring the Format to the industry.
Program developers note that GreenFormat will help organize basic product information, providing objective standards-based performance measurements to verify their green and sustainable characteristics. Having this information available in a common and structured format, they add, will reduce research time and thereby improve designer/specifier/builder productivity, while manufacturers consume less time responding to project-specific questions about their products.
Manufacturers listing in GreenFormat will complete an online reporting questionnaire about their products. Sustainable information reported in GreenFormat is grouped into categories, and the resource will be available to the construction industry through www.greenformat.com.
The Foundation invested in this project because we believe that GreenFormat meets a market need by facilitating project teams’ ability to support green design and also by enabling better quality construction documents, says Rik Kunnath, president of the Charles Pankow Foundation, which is named for a key innovator in precast concrete building methods and design/build project delivery.
Adds CSI Technical Director Roger Grant, The grant funding will be used to accelerate achieving a consensus version with a Îcritical massÌ of product data, thereby bringing the benefits of GreenFormat to the industry in a more rapid and concerted way.
To complete testing and deliver GreenFormat to the industry, BuildingGreen, Inc. and McGraw-Hill Construction have joined forces with the Charles Pankow and CSI foundations. BGI brings its expertise in construction sustainability to the process by providing CSI technical advice to complete the development of a structured format for product data, which will be used as well to enhance BGI’s GreenSpec product database.