Hidden in plain sight: Creating healthier workplaces

As part of the C2C Certified® Changemaker series, this webinar explored how healthier workplaces are shaped by the products and materials we interact with every day.

Hosted by C2CPII

Hidden in plain sight: Creating healthier workplaces

About the webinar

We spend about 90% of our time indoors – and much of that is in the office. The air we breathe, the surfaces we touch, and the materials that surround us all influence our health and wellbeing. With indoor air often more polluted than outdoor air, and factors such as lighting affecting concentration and productivity, healthier workplaces are more important than ever. As speakers from Shaw Industries, Kawneer and Royal Ahrend demonstrated: healthier workplaces don’t just happen by accident – they’re the result of thousands of product design decisions that create a positive impact instead of simply reducing harm.

Shaw Industries

For Shaw, material health is the foundation of product design: knowing as much about their products as possible, and employing sustainable sourcing policies that consider both material health and social impacts.

Prioritizing material health enabled Shaw to deliver low-VOC products with no off-gassing, contributing to better indoor air quality. And by using design elementssuch as biophilic features, Shaw’s products support a workplace that makes us thrive.

Kawneer Company

To ensure the wellbeing of people in an office, Kawneer focuses on the importance of natural daylighting and air quality. As humans, we are most efficient in vitamin D, which is daylight. Kawneer therefore designs building solutions that maximize daylight while balancing both occupant comfort and the operational carbon that it takes to run a building.

Royal Ahrend

Through repeated C2C Certified® recertifications, Ahrend were able to identify and eliminate materials such as chromium and lead in steel. Within each certification process, they have found an alloy in their products that they could optimize. For Ahrend, this shows that certifications such as C2C Certified® drive continuous innovation by increasing transparency into material composition and helping uncover optimization opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed, even in highly regulated markets.