Perspectives on greener product development and manufacturing from Sustainable Minds, our partners, customers and contributors.

Education Webinar Series: It's ready! Announcing new guidance for creating product group benchmarks to make EPDs comparable

By Sustainable Minds on December 22, 2017

Recorded Dec 19 | Tues, 2–3pm ET / 11am PT

To all industry associations, manufacturers and building professionals,

Finally, a standardized way to make EPDs comparable.
This new document provides detailed guidelines, process examples and tools for creating a Benchmarking Addendum to a PCR. The addendum includes not only the additional rules needed to create an industry-wide EPD for use as a credible product group benchmark; it also includes how manufacturers can use it to make comparative claims.

This benchmarking guidance standardizes the creation of industry-wide EPDs to:

  • Create product group benchmarks to which manufacturers’ product-specific EPDs can be compared; these EPDs can then be used to demonstrate business advantage and differentiation

  • Encourage more manufacturers to do LCAs of their products by providing for continual participation; not limiting the ability to compare to only manufacturers who participated in the initial industry-wide EPD

  • Set goals for improvement over time to reduce the greatest impacts in all categories by life cycle stage

  • Make it possible to achieve the LEED v4 MR credit: Building product disclosure and optimization - environmental product declarations: option 2, by comparing product-specific EPDs to the benchmark

POC webinar 
 Kim Lewis,SM Transparency Report Program Coordinator, Sustainable Minds
Terry Swack, Founder & CEO, Sustainable Minds

Attend the webinar to learn about:

  • The benefits of benchmarking using industry-wide EPDs to compare product-specific LCA results
  • How this standardized process and the tools for creating a Benchmarking Addendum work
  • How manufacturers can get started creating Benchmarking Addenda

Consortium members are actively seeking industry groups to create pilot Benchmarking Addenda for priority product groups (i.e. those for which building professionals are actively looking to compare results). Contact us to learn more.

Download: Guidance for Creating Product Group Benchmarks

Learn what JOINING and WORKING with the Consortium can do for you. programoperators.org