10 Years of Healthy Materials Lab: Looking Back, Leaping Forward

This year, we celebrate a decade of Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons School of Design, ten years of radically reimagining what it means to build for human and environmental health.

When we started in 2015, the concept of material health barely registered in the design world. Toxic chemicals are hidden in plain sight, embedded in the walls, floors, and ceilings of our everyday environments. We knew healthier environments were urgent and we were impatient for change.

In ten years, we’ve transformed a quiet issue into a growing movement. Now, “healthy materials” and “material health” are recognized terms in relation to design. And Healthy Materials Lab has become a trusted hub for education, innovation, and advocacy:

• Over 25,000 people have taken our educational courses
• 15,000+ attended our events and exhibitions
• 177,000+ views/uses of our online Healthier Materials Collections
• 7,000+ homes impacted in Building Healthy Homes projects across 18 U.S. cities
• 570,000+ people now live in healthier environments through our collaborations (?)
• 570 members and 200+ universities in our Academic Network
• We’ve engaged with 550 manufacturers, advocating for safer alternatives
• The work of the Lab is the work of us all, our HML family - administrators, researchers, post grads, and over a 100 student researchers, as well as our community of partners who have become leaders in their industries. Thank you team! 

We are proud to share all of this — every course, every vetted material, every event. 

From our pioneering use of hempLime to redefining what “healthier” means in the built environment, we’ve led with clarity, curiosity, and compassion. We’ve also changed language: introducing the term “hemplime” when we realized “hempcrete” was misleading.

The term material health is now searched 400% more than when we started. Transparency is no longer optional; it’s expected. The industry is listening. But buildings are going up fast, and the stakes are higher than ever. Every decision today locks in decades of impact.

We move between building awareness and innovative methods of implementation. The big question now is: how do we accelerate adoption?

We’re setting ambitious goals for the decade ahead:

• Broaden the adoption of regenerative, biogenic materials like HempLime
• Translate our work for greater global accessibility, including Spanish-language resources
• Build new collaborations with housing authorities and community groups in the U.S. and build out our networks and partnerships in HML EU
• Partner with wellness, media, and advocacy organizations to share knowledge and resources with more people -  especially women, families, and historically underserved communities
• Create a more interactive digital platform to support designers and homeowners alike
• Increase Support for healthy building prototypes in under-resourced communities

This is about scale, equity, and collective action.

We’re hosting a celebration this coming Fall. This will be a night to reflect, reconnect, and reimagine what’s possible together. Stay tuned for details.

Thank you for being with us over the last 10 years. Whether you’ve taken a course, accessed our materials collections, worked on a project with us, shared a tool, or started a conversation, you’re helping shape a healthier future for everyone and making long-term impact. 

Here’s to the next decade of radical, regenerative design that truly makes a difference.