Sharon Prince describes efforts to eliminate forced and child labor from construction supply chains. The building industry produces massive carbon emissions while relying on materials like bricks, polysilicon, and timber sourced through forced labor. She argues construction needs the same transparency and accountability systems that food and clothing industries are developing.
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taking on the entire construction sector and creating this radical paradigm shift to remove forced and child labor from the building material supply chain. And it takes a whole industry to become a part of that. And that's what we did. The built environment does have a relationship to nature and people. And the question that brought people around the table is, Is your building ethically sourced, forced labor free, as well as sustainably designed? That was a question I asked end of 2017, beginning of 2018 to get people on board. And the answer is, we don't know. If you look around here, you don't know where these materials are made from. You have— there's unlike even clothing, you know the provenance, you might not know who, but you know, oh, I know the origin on a piece of clothing, but you don't know. And these are materials that are highly fraught. So the one thing to note is that we're with construction. You think about labor, but it's mainly on the job site. What's been— the whole sector's been given a labor transparency pass on the material procurement side, and half of the cost of a building is the material procurement. So construction, is the largest industry that is, that has the largest industrialized industry at risk of forced and child labor. It's also the most egregious violator of carbon emissions at 37%. And they do go together. And we could talk about that another time, why that relationship, you might be studying that. But the size of the industry, nearly $14 trillion in consumer spending and spending globally, and There are new numbers that just came out of estimates of the illicit profits that are being earned by subsidizing with forced labor, $236 billion, of which, that's on modern slavery, of which $63 billion derived from forced labor. At that time, there was no list of materials, and this is literally only, 5, 6 years ago, right? 5, 5, 2018, at the beginning, no list of the materials. So we issued that. And I also, I'll explain how that happened because we started to, and before I do, the most important thing is people, not the numbers, is we have, there's 28 million people in forced labor conditions around the world, estimated, likely more. And it's been escalating the last, estimate that was revealed was 25 million a few years ago, 5 years ago. And it's escalating. It's not decreasing even with more knowledge, right, about supply chains and forced labor. Here's that list of materials that really some of them have longstanding histories of forced labor. Rubber, you might be studying these in different ways, but rubber, glass, fiber, textiles, steel, electronics, bricks. Think about, right? It's crazy. Timber and copper, stone. Let's read the rest of them. Iron, minerals, and polysilicon. Okay, these are at-risk materials and we're not expecting our supply chain. Now solar panels, you saw polysilicon is fraught. I mean, it definitely is. Solar panels are not sustainable if they're subsidized with forced labor and made with that. So I know you're working on projects that, okay, this is a very important concept because 35 to 45% of all the polysilicon in the world is being sourced from the Uyghur region of China. But that's not the only at-risk material. You have steel, copper, aluminum, glass. Glass also, when I described that before, There are no third-party audited certifications for glass that include fair labor. There are for many others that we put in our toolkit. So now we also see some low-hanging fruit, right? There's been, I said first food was called to be accountable, then clothing, next is shelter. Clothing has already been accountable and there are certain transparency certifications that have been put into play. There's more transparency in that. Sector. So now we're looking to take that sector, uh, and that accountability and convert that into interiors. So are they, you know, curtains, chairs, carpet, right? Just the textiles alone from that, from the garment industry, we can convert, and we're doing that.
