NRMCA Seeks Data for Industry Average EPD: Information Needed by December 20

NRMCA, working with the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute (Athena), is developing an Industry Wide Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) for Concrete and is seeking data from concrete producers. The project is being funded by the RMC Research & Education Foundation. The newly adopted LEED v4 has a credit that requires EPDs from 20 permanently installed building products. Concrete, because of its versatility, can potentially contribute many "products" (footings, basement walls, columns, shear walls, elevated slabs, beams, etc.) toward meeting this credit. This means that concrete producers that have EPDs for their products will be able to contribute to this credit in a significant way, either by providing a Product Specific EPD (for full value) or an Industry Wide EPD (for ½ value). Although Product Specific EPDs (e.g., plant-specific) are more valuable in LEED v4, the cost of producing them is prohibitive and using an Industry Wide EPD would be a cost effective alternative (click here for a detailed description of EPDs).

To develop the Industry Wide EPD, NRMCA will need information from concrete plants, such as material quantities purchased, transportation distances from your suppliers, plant energy use and typical mix designs. This information will be used to conduct a Life Cycle Assessment for a variety of industry representative mix designs and their environmental impacts reported in an Industry Wide EPD. These data will be collected during the first quarter of 2014 for the most recent 12-month reporting period (calendar or fiscal year).

1. Only those producers who provide data for the Industry Wide EPD can be listed and be eligible to use the document for a LEED submittal.

2. Any data provided will remain completely confidential – Athena has signed a non-disclosure agreement.

3. Companies must be an NRMCA member at time of publishing to be listed in the EPD.

NRMCA is seeking someone from each company who will be the Primary Contact for this project. He or she will be responsible for collecting data from some of the company’s plants in different regions of the country. Athena will be conducting the survey online and it will work with the Primary Contact to define how many and which plants to collect data from and what data to collect.