Washington Concrete Group Communicates Importance of EPDs to Membership

The Washington Aggregates & Concrete Association (WACA) hosted its annual winter workshop last week in Tacoma, WA; the main focus of the meeting was the movement toward Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) in the green building marketplace, reports NRMCA Senior Vice President of Sustainable Development Lionel Lemay who attended the meeting. WACA Executive Director Bruce Chattin assembled a group of speakers representing the academic, design, construction and manufacturing communities to lay out the new requirements for material reporting in LEED v4, including EPDs. Kate Simonen of the University of Washington described the EPD process. Don Davies, a structural engineer with Magnusson Klemencic & Associates, described how the design community will use the information described in EPDs to make informed decisions on structural materials. Jeff Davis of Central Concrete, the first concrete company in North America to verify an EPD, described how it is leveraging its EPD and other sustainability initiatives into a market advantage in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lemay described the business case for moving toward reporting environmental impacts through EPDs and other reports required in LEED v4, including Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports and Health Product Declarations (HPDs). He also described the many programs and tools available to concrete producers to help meet these new requirements, including the NRMCA EPD Program.