Advancing our Materials Pledge Commitment

Ayers Saint Gross signed the AIA Materials Pledge to formalize our commitment to support human health, social health and equity, ecosystem health, climate health, and a circular economy through our material specifications. Every two years, we’ve diligently evaluated our specifications’ basis of design products to prioritize the use of those that have material transparency documents such as Environmental Product Declarations and material ingredient inventories that communicate human health hazards. 

Following the beta reporting period last fall, we’re proud to share that we completed our firm level reporting as well as all 25 projects for which we issued documents for construction in 2024. Combined with our annual reporting to the AIA 2030 Commitment, this work demonstrates our efforts to advance sustainability and human health across our architecture and interiors portfolio. 

At a firm level, our Sustainability Action Plan specifically includes goals about materials. As the Materials Pledge has matured, we’re also actively considering ways to evolve our materials library both in-person and online to make it easier for us to identify and specify products and materials that align with the Materials Pledge’s ambitious goals. 

In the last year, we’ve hosted over half a dozen continuing education sessions specifically focusing on sustainable materials knowledge sharing. We’ve also published an extensive series of internal reference articles on the Materials Pledge to help our team broadly understand the impact our specifications make in supporting environmental and human health. 

Given our internal skills on embodied carbon analysis, we feel most confident in our knowledge about the Climate Health impact category within the Materials Pledge followed close behind with our knowledge in the Human Health, Circular Economy, and Ecosystem Health impact categories. We’re deeply curious about the Social Health & Equity impact category and continuing to grow our expertise in how the materials we specify impact communities across their supply chains. 

We are working to increase our materials tracking beyond our projects seeking third-party certifications to better quantify the impact of our decisions, and we look forward to collaborating with our clients and consultants in advancing this work. 

Of the 25 projects for which we issued documents for construction in 2024 and reported into the AIA Materials Pledge, seven are seeking third-party certifications, and one is complying with the International Green Construction Code. Rating systems and codes help provide a standardized framework on which to evaluate material attributes and can define what “good” looks like within the context of a particular project. 

Our design teams regularly consider resilience and durability in their design and material selection work, but uptake on designing for deconstruction and potential reuse of materials as well as integrating salvaged, reclaimed, or reused materials and products has remained more elusive. Our work at Bryant University Business Entrepreneurship Leadership Center has provided a notable opportunity to integrate salvaged and reused materials resulting in substantial embodied carbon savings as well as cost savings on materials and construction labor. 

Our most common strategies to reduce material usage include designing to the typical dimensions of common product modules to minimize cutoff waste, as well as developing efficient buildings that ultimately reduce the total program area of projects. Efficient space planning ensures that the work we design meets program requirements without wasting either materials in construction or energy in operations. 

Nearly half of the projects we reported use some amount of modular or prefabricated construction elements to maximize their efficiency. Prefabrication can increase the precision with which components of a project are built as well as the potential for material damage because of the more controlled environment in which prefabrication occurs. Prefabrication also tends to include component standardization and integrate Building Information Modeling (BIM) to optimize material efficiency. 

Embodied carbon studies were completed on six of the projects we issued documents for construction on in 2024. We hope to build on this modeling to further reduce the environmental impact of the projects we design in 2025.