contractor to use more materials to cut down labour time. For example, if my partners and I decided to reuse old 2x4s on a job, would we charge the building owners for the time to pull all the old nails, inflating their costs, or would we would we donate the time ourselves, essentially subsidizing the job with our own meagre incomes? Invariably it always seems cheaper to dump the demolition and use new materialseven though society and the environment pay dearly for such behaviour. Even when more enlightened environmental behaviour might pay off in monetary terms, it was often very difficult to know what materials were more ecological and where they might be obtained. Despite all my books and magazine subscriptions, it seemed every job had to be individually researched (again, for free unless one wanted to price oneself right out of a job). There was no basic directory or central clearinghouse for information on green building materials, and in the few cases where there was, it was typically a thousand miles away, and therefore useless for guidance on local building. Green building, green materials and green economics are all very specific to place. An organic tomato that has to be shipped 1500 miles is not an ecological food. The same is true of an eco-paint made with rainforest resins and manufactured in Germany. These dilemmas eventually spawned the Eco-Materials Research Project in Toronto. Although initiated by our Green City Construction company in 1994, it became an expression of the informal network of green building people in Toronto. Since then, the Eco-Materials Project has been the primary focus of my building industry work. It has been an excellent introduction to the complexity of green product evaluation, and to the difficulties of creating new kinds of markets for green production.