The GreenFormat resource will be available to the construction industry through www.greenformat.com

The Charles Pankow Foundation awarded a grant in the amount of $153,000 to the CSI Foundation to support continued development of GreenFormat™, a new CSI format that enables manufacturers to accurately report the sustainability-measuring properties of their products for use by designers, constructors and building operators.

GreenFormat will help organize basic information about products and provide objective standard-based performance measurements about their green and sustainable characteristics. Having this information available in a common and structured format will reduce research time and thereby improve designer/specifier/builder productivity. In addition, manufacturers will benefit by reducing time spent responding to firm-specific questions about their products.

To use GreenFormat, product manufacturers will complete an online reporting questionnaire about their products. Sustainable information reported in GreenFormat is grouped into categories. The GreenFormat resource will be available to the construction industry through www.greenformat.com

Accessing quantifiable data about product performance will address industry concerns about "greenwashing" by tying products to objective performance standards and ultimately help the industry move toward reducing the impact of buildings on the environment.

"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 for building design and construction teams," said Rik Kunnath, president of the Charles Pankow Foundation. The funds will be used to acquire industry comment, revise and refine the draft version of the format, refine the website and database and bring the format to the industry. Roger Grant, technical director of CSI, said, "The grant funding is very important to us and will be used to accelerate achieving a consensus version with a ‘critical mass’ of product data available thereby bringing the benefits of GreenFormat to the industry in a more rapid and concerted way."

The Charles Pankow Foundation joins CSI and BuildingGreen, Inc (BGI) to complete testing and deliver GreenFormat to the industry. BGI brings its expertise in construction sustainability to the process by providing technical advice to CSI to complete the development and assist in maintaining the quality of GreenFormat.