Declare Label & the Red List Explained [2026]

Food packaging has had to list its ingredients for decades, yet a wall assembly, which people breathe next to for forty hours a week, has never had to say what is inside it. The Declare label is the building industry's answer to that asymmetry: a nutrition label for products, listing what is actually inside, screened against a list of the chemicals the industry most needs to leave behind. It has become the easiest place to see the material-transparency movement working. This guide covers what the Declare label is, what it shows, the Red List behind it, the three declaration statuses, the Living Building Challenge connection, and how transparency pays off in LEED.

What is the Declare label?

The Declare label is a voluntary ingredients-disclosure label for building products from the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), which describes Declare as a platform to share and find healthy building products: manufacturers publish what their products contain in an easy-to-read label, collected in a free public database.

The nutrition-label comparison is the fastest way to understand it, and it is the framing the industry itself uses. Like a food label, a Declare label converts a proprietary formulation into a public, standardized statement that a non-chemist can read, and it draws its power from the same source: once disclosure is normal, the undisclosed product starts to look like it has something to hide. The voluntary architecture matters too. Manufacturers choose to declare, which means every label doubles as a market signal, and the freely searchable database turns individual acts of transparency into a specification tool anyone can use.

What a Declare label shows

A Declare label presents the product's material inventory and health information in ingredient-label form: what the product is made of, screened against the Red List, along with its declaration status, so a specifier can read a product's chemical story at a glance instead of decoding safety data sheets.

What makes the label valuable is as much its format as its content. The information it carries existed before, scattered across safety data sheets, supplier letters, and technical documents that only consultants had the patience to assemble; the label's contribution is to compress that pile into one standardized page per product. Reading one is deliberately simple: the ingredient inventory tells you what is inside, the status line (covered below) tells you how it fared against the Red List, and chemicals on ILFI's Priority List, candidates under consideration for future Red List inclusion, are flagged visibly without changing the product's status. In other words, the label presents transparency in a form that needs no specialist interpretation.

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What is the Red List?

The Red List is ILFI's curated inventory of worst-in-class chemicals prevalent in building products, substances posing serious risks to human health and the environment, with classes including asbestos, PFAS, orthophthalates, formaldehyde, heavy metals such as lead and mercury, halogenated flame retardants, and PCBs.

The list is deliberately short and focused. Rather than attempting to rank every chemical in commerce, it names the worst offenders that still show up in ordinary building products, which turns an impossibly large chemistry problem into a checkable screening question: does this product contain any of these? The names on it are familiar for bad reasons (asbestos and PCBs from history, PFAS and phthalates from current headlines, formaldehyde from the low-VOC conversation), and that familiarity is the point: these are chemicals whose risks are established enough that avoidance, not debate, is the reasonable design response. The Red List gives that avoidance a precise, shared definition.

The three declaration statuses

Per ILFI, a Declare label carries one of three statuses: LBC Red List Free (the product contains none of the restricted chemicals), LBC Red List Approved (it contains some, but complies under specific exceptions), and Declared (the product is fully disclosed).

The three tiers reflect how the industry actually changes. Red List Free is the destination, and the status specifiers reach for first. Red List Approved exists because supply chains are imperfect: in some product categories, fully compliant options are still emerging, and the exceptions acknowledge that reality while keeping pressure on it. Declared rewards the transparency itself, because a manufacturer that discloses an imperfect formulation has done something more useful than one that stays silent, and public disclosure tends to be the first step toward reformulation. Together, the three statuses give manufacturers a visible way to make progress, instead of a single pass-or-fail bar.

Declare, the Living Building Challenge, and transparency

Declare is built as the market companion to the Living Building Challenge, ILFI's deep-green building standard whose materials requirements center on Red List avoidance: the label gives LBC project teams a direct way to find compliant products, and gives manufacturers market access to the world's greenest buildings.

The pairing explains why the label exists at all. The Living Building Challenge asks project teams to build without Red List chemistry, which is a sourcing puzzle of real difficulty, and Declare converts that puzzle into a database query. A useful cycle follows from this: demanding projects create demand for disclosed products, disclosure makes compliant products findable, and findability makes the demanding standard achievable for the next team. Declare sits alongside sibling disclosures with different lenses (environmental product declarations for impacts, health product declarations for hazard inventories), and among them it is deliberately the easiest to read, which is why it often serves as a project's first step into material transparency.

The Declare label in LEED

LEED rewards the transparency Declare represents: in the v5 Materials and Resources category, the Building Product Selection and Procurement credit (MRc4, 5 points) leads the credit family that pays projects for choosing disclosed, better-performing products, making labels like Declare part of the working paperwork of certification.

The logic mirrors the rest of v5's materials story: the scorecard cannot test every product's chemistry itself, so it rewards the ecosystem that does, and third-party disclosures are the evidence it accepts. In practice that gives a Declare label two audiences on a LEED project: the designer using it to choose products whose contents are known, and the documentation lead counting it among the disclosures the product-selection credits recognize. The 5 points on MRc4 make it one of the larger single credits in the category, a meaningful signal of how much modern LEED values knowing what buildings are made of.

Using Declare in practice

In practice, specifiers use Declare in two ways: they search the free database to find disclosed and Red List Free products in each category, and they write the label into specifications where enough products carry it. When a product in a sensitive category has no disclosure at all, that is a good reason to ask the manufacturer why.

How firmly to ask for the label depends on the product category. In categories where disclosure has become common, requesting Declare (or an equivalent disclosure) costs the project very little and reliably filters out the least transparent options. In categories where fewer products carry labels, it works better as a preference than a strict requirement, and the Red List itself can serve as the screening checklist instead. Products that face the interior and cover large areas deserve the closest attention, because they sit nearest to the people breathing beside them, which is the same reasoning behind low-emitting materials. For exam candidates, Declare is part of the transparency vocabulary the exams test again and again, and it is exactly the kind of interconnected content our Green Associate Complete Exam Prep Pack teaches as one system, with our flashcards keeping the labels, lists, and statuses easy to recall on exam day.

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