Environmental product declarations are becoming an industry standard for driving down embodied carbon in the built environment. Embodied carbon refers to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions associated with upstream—extraction, production, transport and manufacturing—stages of a product’s life.

Tools like EPDs are important for reducing the significant problem of climate-damaging embodied carbon in the built environment.

The building and construction industry is responsible for a significant amount of these harmful emissions, generating 42 percent of annual global CO² emissions. Approximately 27 percent of those total annual emissions come from building operations, with the other 15 percent coming from embodied carbon. These embodied carbon emissions from the built environment are expected to increase, as the world is expected to add about 2.6 trillion feet of new floor area to the global building stock from 2020 to 2060, the equivalent of adding an entire New York City to the world every month for 40 years.

While EPDs are a vital tool for mitigating the environmental impact of the built environment, not all EPDs provide the level of data needed to select the lowest-embodied-carbon building materials. Granular, site-specific EPDs provide the wealth of information needed to make the most sustainable building material selections.

What are EPDs?

Environmental Product Declarations, often compared to nutritional labels on food items, serve as a transparent means to convey the environmental impact of products or materials throughout their life cycle. These declarations disclose detailed information on the effects of raw material extraction, manufacturing processes, product use, waste generation, efficiency and energy use, and end-of-life considerations, shedding light on environmental impacts of building materials and products.

EPDs are now a standard tool used by stakeholders in the building design and construction sector to identify and compare the environmental impacts of materials throughout their life cycle.

What are the Different Types of EPDs?

In the construction industry, three types of EPDs are used to compare the carbon intensity and environmental impact of functionally equivalent building products and materials. These EPDs include:

• Industry-Wide EPDs: These declarations, established by industry associations, represent average environmental impacts for a specific product type. These serve as great benchmarking tools, but they often fall short of providing the precise embodied carbon accounting needed.

• Product-Specific EPDs: Offering more granular data than industry averages, product-specific EPDs represent life cycle assessment data for a specific manufacturer’s products. However, these EPDs may still present generalized datasets when averaged across multiple production facilities.

• Site-Specific EPDs: Offering the most granular data, site-specific EPDs provide environmental impact data focused on a single manufacturer and manufacturing facility. Originating from LCAs analyzing products from specific facilities, these EPDs provide data about manufacturing sites, product attributes and supplier-specific information associated with each site.

Why is the Use of EPDs Increasing?

The use of EPDs is gaining momentum as market demands grow for data and insights on the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of building materials. Stakeholders in the construction sector are turning to EPDs to make meaningful comparisons of the environmental performance of building materials to inform their selection of low-carbon materials that can help achieve carbon reduction targets.

Regulatory requirements are also fueling the use of EPDs. States, such as California, Colorado, Minnesota and Oregon, are implementing Buy Clean policies that require EPDs to help procure construction materials with lower embodied GHG emissions. The federal government is also requiring the use of EPDs for the procurement of substantially lower embodied-carbon construction materials in General Services Administration projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Green-building certification programs are another factor accelerating the demand for EPDs. That’s because the use of EPDs can help building projects obtain certifications in programs, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method.

Why Do Granular, Site-Specific EPDs Matter?

It is important to know that not all EPDs are equally informative. Many contemporary declarations rely on industry or company averages, lacking the granular data vital for allowing architects and designers to make conscientious choices in minimizing embodied carbon in building materials.

Selecting lower-embodied-carbon building materials is critical, considering embodied carbon from these materials is irrevocable once construction is complete. This locked-in nature underscores the importance of using site-specific EPDs to make material selections with lower global warming potential.

Site-specific EPDs offer transparent, science-based insights into the GWP of building materials. The granularity of data provided by these EPDs makes them pivotal to helping architects select high-performing building materials with lower GWP potential, which can help contribute to reducing the climate-damaging embodied carbon in the built environment.

When it comes to transparency and accuracy of the environmental impact of construction materials, the more specific the data, the better. That’s why site-specific EPDs matter.

Stakeholders in the building sector should prioritize site-specific declarations over less detailed industry and product EPDs. Site-specific EPDs provide architects with the data necessary to make impactful choices in reducing harmful embodied carbon emissions in the built environment.

Photos and Example Data from Kingspan