Reflecting on a decade of progress in sustainable materials and the power of collaboration to drive change.
At mindful MATERIALS' 10th anniversary celebration, we honored Alex Muller Beckman for her contributions to our work. Alex’s journey is one of curiosity, collaboration, and a relentless drive to connect the dots between disparate voices and ideas in the sustainability space.
Alex has always been innovative, from diving into product sustainability as a graduate student to her leadership in fostering industry-wide conversations and collective action. In this Q&A, she shares her journey, insights, and hopes for the future of sustainable materials.
Q: Please share a little about your journey and how you became involved with mindful MATERIALS.
Alex: It’s felt a bit like falling into a rabbit hole. In 2013, I went to graduate school to study sustainability and innovation, which led to working on a Living Building project at Purdue. I eagerly took on any task they’d let a graduate student tackle (materials, naturally) and dove into the world of product sustainability, red lists, and beyond. When ILFI opened a position to support the new Living Product Challenge certification and Declare, I was well-suited to step in.
At ILFI, I gained a solid foundation in building and product sustainability and learned the importance of industry movements and collective action to overcome the challenges faced across the building sector. I eventually co-led the LP50, a group of manufacturers exploring sustainability beyond the usual conversations about cost and complexity, aiming to drive meaningful change. Alongside collaborators, including Annie Bevan, we shifted the group’s focus toward closing the communication loop—helping manufacturers make sustainability investments with clearer feedback from architects and designers. This effort culminated in a letter campaign asking A+D firms to partner in building forward momentum.
Though ILFI’s programs took a different direction, the movement for collaboration and collective action found a new home at mindful MATERIALS. When Annie became CEO, I joined shortly after to lead strategy and communications. What began as a volunteer-driven initiative soon evolved into a fully-fledged nonprofit. During my time there, I helped restart its newsletter, helped to establish the first strategic plan, facilitated meetings, and used illustrations to shed light on the complex challenges of materials sustainability.
Q: What first sparked your interest in sustainability within the building materials industry?
Alex: Learning about the absolute disaster that is chemical regulation in the United States. There’s nothing worse for your shopping habits than realizing that everything is made from unknown substances and coated in something else that usually tends to migrate away from the material to its users. Most manufacturers don’t know what any of it is. It makes picking a sofa impossible.
Q: What motivated you to contribute to mindful MATERIALS, and what do you see as the most significant impact of your work so far?
Alex: I think I was motivated by communication. I am driven to find the right words that will allow people to understand other perspectives. I wanted people to understand the potential of getting out of their siloes, their own day to day, and coming together around a bigger purpose.
Q: Can you describe a project or achievement with mindful MATERIALS you’re particularly proud of?
Alex: Helping to establish the Forums was the realization of many years of work and frustration in the industry. There were so many industry groups out there, but none I could see were focused on the intersection between different disciplines to advance sustainability. It felt at every industry summit that the manufacturers blamed the A+D, A+D blamed the owners, and owners blamed construction — for the failures we all shared in changing the norm for materials. It felt important for mM’s position to gather some of the leaders out there and make the case for getting on the same page clear, and build connection and empathy across the different groups.
I also wrote a very unhinged blog post that tapped into something other people felt in different positions across the industry about the futility of solving our collective challenges by working alone. None of the problems I laid out in the piece have been solved yet, but the piece was designed to raise awareness, and I think it did that.
Lastly, I got to collaborate with Jen and Laurel on the Invisible Threads poster, a collaboration with Studio O+A. The words we wrote and the illustrations that Studio O+A created have stuck with me.
Q: How do you see the materials industry evolving in the next few years, and what role would you like mindful MATERIALS to play in that evolution?
Alex: Data digitization and connection is a huge unknown — how it will all come together in the end, and what role mM will play. It will cost a lot of money to make this happen effectively and to make a back-end interface that people can use and organizations can maintain. I’d like mindful MATERIALS’ role on data clarity vs. sustainability to become clearer. To take a stand, one way or another.
Q: What are some changes you hope to see in sustainable materials practices, either within your organization or across the industry as a whole?
Alex: I want to see more honesty and authenticity in how manufacturers, designers, and owners represent their materials work. Where are you meeting the bar? Where are you not? What are the challenges you’re facing? You know, more real talk. I’d be more interested in that than what I’ve typically seen in marketing.
Q: Who or what inspires you in your work toward sustainability?
Alex: Same as above, I suppose. Connection. Finding the common points, across our differences. Also, it shouldn’t be so hard to know what products have problematic substances within or on top of them. I’m motivated by making that intuitive for everyone that doesn’t have a degree and a FTE role to research it.
Q: What advice would you give to someone starting in the sustainable materials space?
Alex: Learn from other people’s mistakes, and know that you will make many of them, too. No one is getting it right, so get it better.
Q: As we celebrate mindful MATERIALS’ 10th anniversary, what are your hopes for the next decade of progress?
Alex: I’ve seen a new era of collaboration under mM’s materials leadership, especially across data platforms and non-profit certification organizations. There are so many unknowns about how to implement the CMF, yet it’s already happening; the alignment is already happening despite that.
Connect with Alex → https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-muller/
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