Kevin O’Donnell and Aleida Montejo of the Thread Collaborative were our guests at the MVCC Green Booth yesterday and brought a fascinating selection of sustainable building materials - many of them using reclaimed or recycled materials. Anyone involved in the design or acrchitecture fields were thrilled that they had stopped by.
If you are involved in a building or remodeling project, check out the material data base that they will be building on their web site.
Many of us had the chance to hear Kevin O’Donnell’s presentation at the Wise Water Use Expo – where he distilled the information that he was trained to present by Al Gore for his Climate Project and made it relevant to the water crisis we face in Mar Vista.
About Thread Collaborative:
Several years ago his retail clients starting asking questions for which he had few answers. And they weren’t terribly complicated - where does this material come from, how is it manufactured, are there any toxins present, can it be recycled or repurposed, is it composed of recycled content, and many more. His clients were pressing him to make more informed decisions regarding each material specified on their behalf, especially those that potentially have lasting impact on their customers and planet. The real problem he faced was not being able to answer those questions, it was finding manufacturers willing to share this kind of information. Even today, many companies hide behind the claim that revealing such knowledge is the same as disclosing proprietary protected processes. It became obvious that he would need to dig deeper and work harder.
That effort led to more than five years of research, of building relationships with alternative manufacturers, of developing a network of suppliers, and turning to alternative sources of raw building material (including their client’s dumpsters). The more he learned, the more he realized the need to share this information with design colleagues and the industries they serve.
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