Chilean Company Becomes Second to Publish Environmental Product Declaration for Concrete

Transex Concrete, a ready mixed concrete company located in Chile, has become the second concrete company in the world to produce a third-party verified Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) for concrete using the Carbon Leadership Forum Product Category Rule (PCR) for concrete. The announcement was made in November during the 19th Chilean Conference on Sustainable Concrete in Santiago. The voluntary declaration provides quantified environmental impacts for 120 different concrete products manufactured by Transex at three different plants in the greater Santiago metropolitan region. The EPD was verified under the DAPCO EPD Program in Chile. This follows the first EPD published last April by San Francisco Bay Area-based and NRMCA Producer member Central Concrete, a U.S. Concrete Company, in which it declared nearly 1,500 concrete products manufactured at eight concrete plants. The Central Concrete EPD was third-party verified under NRMCA' EPD Program.

Environmental Product Declarations, or EPDs for short, are third-party verified reports published by product manufacturers that provide information regarding the environmental impacts of their products, including global warming potential, smog formation potential and ozone depletion potential, among others. They are intended to assist specifiers, purchasers and users of products to compare environmental impacts of different products. EPDs are developed in accordance with strict international standards that include a transparent verification process through an EPD Program Operator. To produce an EPD, a company must perform a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) on its product and report the results in the EPD. The LCA and EPD are conducted under the strict guidance of a Product Category Rule, most often abbreviated as PCR. The PCR for concrete, published in November 2012, was developed by the Carbon Leadership Forum, an industry-academic collaborative research effort hosted by the University of Washington’s College of Built Environment.

More details about EPDs and links to the Central Concrete and Transex EPDs can be found on NRMCA’s EPD Web site. For more information, contact NRMCA's Lionel Lemay at LLemay@nrmca.org or 847-918-7101.