NRMCA Publishes Environmental Impacts of Concrete in Support of LEED v4, Architecture 2030

NRMCA announced at Greenbuild 2014 held this week in New Orleans that it has published a comprehensive set of industry average environmental impacts for concrete to help its members address the movement toward product transparency in LEED v4 and the Architecture 2030 Challenge for Products. These NRMCA documents, known as an Industry-Wide (IW) Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) and Benchmark (Industry Average) Report, disclose the environmental impacts of concrete manufacturing for a wide range of concrete products. EPDs are third-party verified reports published by product manufacturers that provide quality assured and comparable information regarding environmental performance of their product.

LEED v4 has a credit that encourages a project team to use 20 different products on a project that have EPDs. For concrete, a product is defined by each unique mix supplied on the project which means it usually provides several products for a single project. LEED v4 requires that a company must have provided data and be listed in the EPD. The Benchmark (Industry Average) Report presents the impacts for average concrete mixtures at the national level and in eight different regions of the country. This allows companies to compare their product-specific environmental impacts to industry averages and potentially participate in the second option of the LEED v4 EPD credit, which requires a project team to use products totaling at least 50% by cost of all materials on the project that demonstrate three impacts below industry average. 

The reports also support the Architecture 2030 Challenge for Products. The benchmark impacts allow manufacturers and specifiers to demonstrate progress toward the 2030 Challenge for Products’ goals of incremental reductions in carbon emissions from 35% below baseline in 2015 to 50% below baseline in 2030.