Got questions?

Here some ways you can get involved:

Become a Member: Membership supports our operations and growth at mM and gets you access to benefits.

Manufacturers: an important step for you is to clean and enrich your data in the new Portal. This supports data quality and completeness for users. FAQs below!

Everyone: Join a Working and/or Engagement Group. We have Engagement Groups for Users (AEC) and Manufacturers to learn and connect with peers and be the first to hear about mM updates. Fill out this quick form to join. If you want to make a more structured contribution to our mission, you can join a Working Group. We currently have Working Groups for Outreach (Communications + Advocacy), a Content Working Group (supporting evolution of the Common Materials Framework) and a Content Advisory Board (leading development and application of the CMF).

Want to support mindful MATERIALS but don’t have time to contribute to a working group? See our Ways to Engage page. Donations, memberships and sponsorships all allow us to grow our capacity and support your impact!

Yes! Don’t let our ‘.com’ fool you (we are working on a new website in 2023). mM was approved as a nonprofit entity in late 2022 and is thrilled to grow and deepen its charitable mission to enable everyone to choose materials that support health and sustainability holistically. Reach out with questions.

No! mM is a non-profit organization working to focus, convene, align and shift the materials economy for health.

We do not certify products for health or sustainability — our role is to help the market make sense of certifications, and amplify their impact by contextualizing their impact within the Common Materials Framework (CMF).

The Framework is not a certification, it is an organization — think of it as a common language — for sustainability data that will help databases and certification platforms speak to each other, and enable users to make decisions that are consistently informed by sustainability.

The Common Materials Framework (CMF) is the outcome of the most detailed cross-stakeholder industry effort to-date to analyze and organize over 100 of the most common building product and material certifications and disclosures. The framework gives structure to over 650 factors identified within these programs relevant to material sustainability within 5 buckets of health and sustainability, reflecting the broad categories first identified in the AIA A&D Materials Pledge.

How would you define Circularity or Social Health & Equity for materials and use that definition to drive better decisions to make and specify products? Now ask the person sitting next to you — the answer is likely to be either entirely different, or at least slightly different. Those inconsistencies hold us back as an industry in driving change and measuring progress in reducing the material and embodied impacts of the built environment. The CMF solves that.

Gone are the days of having to constantly present on or memorize the differences between V1.2 and V1.3 of a standard, or individually define sustainability factors. The central framework maps these differences, evolving over time to integrate updates, helping practitioners navigate broad intent or nuances and plot a roadmap to better products.

Once digitized in the mM Library, the framework will act as a smart filter, allowing practitioners to search for sustainable products at any depth. Plus, the framework will seamlessly across all leading building and material databases and technology platforms, ensuring a consistent foundation of information wherever material decisions are made.

For more information and illustrated examples, check out our blog.

No. The CMF is not a certification. The framework is a meta-analysis of all major material certifications and standards in the built environment. Its purpose is to identify all relevant sustainability factors and their benchmarks, and organize those factors within five buckets of sustainability. By unpacking and mapping that information to a common structure that can be used by any professional across the built environment, across multiple tools and databases, the framework drives consistency in decision-making and allows for benchmarking progress and success in improving the holistic health of our built environment and reducing the embodied impacts of buildings.

This overarching structure of 5 buckets was first identified in the AIA A&D Materials Pledge, and is reflected in materials commitments across all stakeholder groups in the built environment, driving a common language for sustainability. By providing the underlying data and organization of those Pledge statements, the CMF also allows signatories of those pledges to navigate and demonstrate achievement on their public commitments.

The CMF is meant to be a tool for anyone looking to make more ‘mindful’ decisions about materials. By organizing how different certifications and standards contribute to the 5 buckets of health identified in the Materials Pledges, the CMF allows individuals and companies to turn their ‘why’ into ‘how’.

Stakeholders who will benefit from this tool include, but are not limited to, A&D Professionals, Manufacturers, Contractors, Educators, Owners, Engineers, Certification Bodies, and Material Database and Building Workflow technology providers.

mindful MATERIALS is in the process of digitizing the content of the CMF so that it can be used as an advanced filtering system to help individuals connect their intent (i.e. reduce negative human health impacts of carpeting) to action. The framework also provides the industry with a central educational tool for understanding how certifications and standards contribute to product sustainability factors, or how to search for products that meet individual or company sustainability goals.

There are over 650 factors, across 100 certifications within the Common Materials Framework (CMF), so needless to say it will take a little time to digitize the framework for its use as a filtering system!

Right now, we have built out the higher levels of the CMF in our Beta Portal (Portal.MindfulMaterials.Com) and will be increasing the granularity of data points for our Phase II and III launches (Q2 2023, and Q1 2024 respectively). We’ll have more guidance on what this means for you as as manufacturer or user!

In the meantime, we are working with certification bodies, technology platforms, pledge leaders, and database providers to drive industry-wide adoption of the CMF as the foundation for all metrics to encourage accountability and comparability. To learn how you can adopt the CMF, reach out to us.

The Common Materials Framework represents a true collaborative, cross-stakeholder industry-led effort. You can see many of the companies who helped to build, organize and present the common materials framework on our CMF page.

mindful MATERIALS convenes and facilitates cross-sector experts and volunteers, associations and certification bodies to guide evolution of the Common Materials Framework via its Content Advisory Board (CAB), Content Working Group (CWG) and Strategic Partnerships.

mindfulMATERIALS will be re-engaging its Content Advisory Board and Content Working Group in 2023 to maintain and evolve the Common Materials Framework.

We will be collecting feedback from the industry, Owners, AEC, and Manufacturers on what additional ecolabels need to be added, as certifications get created or updated so that this is a continuous improvement process to continually update the CMF into the future.

Because we automated the entry of products that have sustainability documentation, there is currently no manual process to review product data for entry into the Portal. However, we will continue to evaluate the Portal and its needs as it evolves to ensure rigor and quality + completeness of product data to be a trusted resource for the industry.

See the list of certifications and standards connected in the Beta Portal today. Also check out the CMF Starter Guide to learn more.

To join any of our working or Engagement Groups, fill out this quick form! We currently have a Content Working group, an Outreach Group, plus two Engagement Groups built for Peer to Peer Engagement — one for AEC, and another for Manufacturers. Check out the groups on our website here.

The mM Portal (currently in beta) allow users to discover products that have transparency and optimization documentation and data, and understand how that documentation contributes to an industry-aligned framework for sustainability, the Common Materials Framework.

The Portal is more than a passive search tool — it brings to life the advocacy of the mindful MATERIALS community by driving the market for sustainability, and activates the data behind product certifications using a common framework, so the impact of each product is clear. Learn more on our Portal page.

We hope to work with all certifying bodies and tech platforms possible to extend the CMF across an ecosystem and into the places designers are doing their best work!

Ecomedes, Inc. provides back-end data aggregation, organization, on-going updates, algorithms, hosting, and presentation of the Framework to the ecosystem of users.

Toxnot provides manufacturers data management for material ingredients, regulatory compliance, sustainability certifications and supplier outreach that will power the Framework algorithms, including in manufacturers’ free accounts.

HPDC will serve as a contributor of granular products contents and associated human health information that will power the Framework algorithms.

EC3 and others will support through their own digitization efforts of embodied carbon, etc.

Mindful MATERIALS is excited to collaborate with other certification and technology partners once the Framework is digitized and the initial Portal is launched — with a goal of integrating the Framework across all major materials platforms in the built environment.

Each of these entities plays an independent role in the activation and connection of data to drive better material decisions. Here’s a quick summary.

• ecomedes is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that can be configured to support the needs of buyers, sellers, and trade organizations in the commercial building ecosystem. Ecomedes hosts solutions for over 75 different industry players ranging from the US Federal Government to small A&D shops.

• Toxnot’s platform provides product manufactures streamlined supplier outreach surveys, material data management, compliance assessment, sustainable reporting and sustainability assessments. Toxnot will provide manufacturers with an easy way to organize their Common Materials Framework data and feed it into the portal.

• mindful MATERIALS is a nonprofit organization. The mM Portal is a centralized hub for the digitized Common Materials Framework. The Portal links manufacturer data to a CMF smart filter that drives users to make more mindful decisions per the Framework, and helps to educate building professionals about embodied impacts of materials. The mM Portal also has baseline requirements for material entry, based on documented transparency and optimization, in order to highlight manufacturers invested in sustainability and encourage a broader market for sustainable materials.

While currently the mM Portal is the only place that you can explore the Common Materials Database, our intent is that in the future an API out will bring the organization and aligned data of the Portal to the most common and impactful workflow tools employed by AEC and Owners. Once that occurs, the Portal will not be used as a search database for product sustainability, but an educational tool to understand the CMF and a product’s alignment with its factors. Data quality and completeness will be our focus, supporting the industry in its goals to understand, measure and reduce its impacts via building materials.

If you’re looking to manage your product data and listings, Toxnot and Ecomedes offer distinct, but complementary approaches.

Who you work with, or if you work with both companies is really dependent on your business needs. Some manufacturers already work with one or the other company to manage their data or product listings; some will end up working with both based on their needs.

Brands work with Toxnot to manage their supply chain and materials data for certification and regulatory compliance. Brands can outreach to supply chains and select what data they want to make publicly available in other tools. Toxnot is also the back-end for programs like Declare. Toxnot offers options to self-manage data within its system.

Brands work with Ecomedes to manage their public-facing product catalog around sustainability for the AEDC community. Ecomedes offers services to help clients manage and clean data, build brand-specific Portals, and connect their data into its other Portals.

In Toxnot, be sure to combine all the relevant certifications in one product record with the name to be used in Ecomedes and publish that passport to mindful MATERIALs. When it flows into the mM portal, that record will become the master mM data for that brand. Any data (certifications, etc) from other sources will be blocked.

Toxnot users have full control of their data, how it’s used, who sees it, and how it’s protected. Suppliers and manufacturers can mark their data as proprietary directly within their Toxnot. All Toxnot users are protected under our NDA and privacy policy built into our user agreement when signing up for Toxnot, including suppliers responding to surveys. To learn more, visit our privacy policy.

Great news, this process is now automated as certifications, standards and data are pulled in from across certifying bodies — and via Toxnot (with more data entry pathways to be added over time).

If you have any one of these certifications or standards, you should see that your applicable products are already listed in the mM Beta Portal.

If you’re a brand/manufacturer in charge of product data and certifications, be sure to go to Portal.MindfulMaterials.Com to check out how your brand listings appear. If you see duplicate entries or missing data/photos, reach out to our partners at Toxnot and Ecomedes to learn which is the right solution for claiming and cleaning your data. Note: any brand can have its data in the Portal if you have applicable sustainability data available, but you must be a mM member to clean your data!

We’d love to tell you what to do, but this truly depends on your business needs!

There are opportunities to correct basic duplicates due to naming differences by reaching out directly to the certifying body to correct the source of the issue.

Beyond that, the best, and easiest, way to clean your data is to review the CMF offerings available through Toxnot and Ecomedes to determine which is right for you.

Looking to enrich your data through Ecomedes? Peruse preset packages available through this landing page. If you would like to dive deeper into activating the CMF or learn more about Ecomedes’ enterprise-level solutions, schedule time here for a personalized walk through.

Curious about getting started with Toxnot for the CMF or looking to understand how your existing work with Toxnot works with the CMF and mM Portal? Sign up for a demo or follow these instructions. For any questions, please reach out to evelyn.ritter@toxnot.com.

Yes, and great news — your mM membership is a great way to also support the ongoing work that mM is doing to focus and align the industry. Head here to become a member.

Reach out to them to learn more, see info below!

Looking to enrich your data through Ecomedes? Peruse preset packages available through this landing page. If you would like to dive deeper into activating the CMF or learn more about Ecomedes’ enterprise-level solutions, schedule time here for a personalized walk through.

Curious about getting started with Toxnot for the CMF or looking to understand how your existing work with Toxnot works with the CMF and mM Portal? Sign up for a demo. For any questions, please reach out to evelyn.ritter@toxnot.com.

There is not currently a data feed from Origin into the new mM Portal, but the great news is that you probably already have data and product listings in the new mM Portal without lifting a finger!

This is because the Portal automatically brings in data from over 100 certifications and standards. From there, you’ll want to audit your data in the Portal, and if there are duplicates or data listings you can work with Toxnot or Ecomedes to clean up your data.

Check out portal.mindfulmaterials.com to see your brand listings, so you can determine what clean up, if any, is required to get your listings looking clean and clear for users of the Portal. If they do require clean-up, there is some minor alignment you can accomplish through direct outreach to certification bodies (make sure your brand name is exactly the same across certifications, etc.).

You can also work with Toxnot to self-manage your data in their platform via free or more comprehensive paid options. Ecomedes also provides services to manage your data and listings for you. Or you may find that working with both companies in some capacity brings the greatest benefits for streamlined data work and product visibility.

Know that even if your listings look clean and great right now, the CMF will continue to activate and drive completion of key data points in the Portal so you may want to future-proof your strategy by claiming your data today! Eventually the CMF and its data will be connected directly to Owner specifications, RFPs and end-use material workflow tools.

Our current resource is this Portal Guide. We are planning to launch a digital reference guide for the Portal and Framework, but do not yet have a set timeline.