The building community must purchase, use and reuse materials with a far greater awareness of reducing harm and maximizing benefits. A clear set of harms and benefits that can be both quantified and qualified to help the building community achieve truly sustainable material decisions was identified.

The key elements of reducing harm are: source of materials matter and should capture economic, environmental and human cost-benefits of the extraction and production of materials and assemblies; distance matters and local materials have lower logistics costs, catalyze the local economy and are often more environmentally-suited to local climates; quantities matter where material or assembly must be renewable in a timeframe that is shorter than the life of its utilization.

The key elements of maximizing benefits are: humans matter where materials gain measurably in value where sourced and used to provide viable skills and empowerment, build capacity and provide living wages; environmental regeneration matters when materials are sourced and used to regenerate environments; innovation matters when materials and assemblies serve multiple purposes, providing integrated performance with less material; and time matters and the longer a material or an assembly provides service, the better the re-materialization. 

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