The Stanley Center for Peace and Security, Muscatine, Iowa, designed by Neumann Monson Architects. This adaptive reuse project is pursuing Living Certification through the Living Building Challenge. (Image courtesy of GAF)
Life Cycle Thinking, Analysis and Product Specific EPDs: Helping Architects and Manufacturers Improve the Built Environment
By Alyson Perez, Senior Product Sustainability Specialist, GAF
Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) are critical to improving green building solutions. These standardized and third-party-verified documents
outline the environmental impacts associated with a building product's life cycle—from raw material extraction to end-of-life disposal or reuse.
Manufacturers can use EPD creation to continue advancing on sustainability goals, demonstrate commitment to the environment and customers, and positively impact transparency in the industry.
Life Cycle Thinking and Assessment are Foundational to Sustainable Business and Products
Incorporating life cycle thinking into product development and business operations is critical to providing the optimal sustainable solutions for the built environment. Life cycle thinking is the understanding of how all aspects and inputs in your business goes into the development and outcomes in your products. When this thinking is incorporated into life cycle assessments at the individual product level, manufacturers develop better products for the built environment and society overall.
Product life cycle assessments should be reviewed to understand the environmental impact of each product's production stages, from raw material extraction to end-of-life disposal or reuse. Then, we can leverage that information to improve our products and production in the future. For example, life cycle assessments can help identify "hot spots" in the production chain. Hot spots are areas—like fuel inefficiencies in raw material transportation—where it's possible to reduce some of the embodied carbon associated with producing the product.
Phases of a Life Cycle Analysis (Image Courtesy of GAF)
Product Specific EPDs A Beneficial Outcome
The roofing industry, along with many other types of building materials, has long relied on industry-wide EPDs created from aggregate product data. As a result, our architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) community members have had fewer opportunities to make informed sustainability choices around roofing materials.
With product-specific EPDs, companies, designers and owners can make more informed product sustainability decisions. EPDs can be used as a resource when making material selections and can be used to calculate a building’s total carbon footprint through a whole-building life cycle assessment (LCA). Product specific EPDs improve the accuracy of whole-building LCAs and can help differentiate between materials within the same product category. AIA provides multiple resources on the application of EPDs on their website.
The knowledge gained with life cycle assessments creates positive company movement, including product improvements and new product innovations.
Empowering the AEC Community
Transparency and product information help us all build a better world. We're committed to empowering designers, builders, architects, and engineers by providing information about the lifecycle and environmental impact of products whenever possible.
The information provided by third-party certified, product specific EPDs also supports architects and designers that have joined the AIA Material Pledge. The information contained in EPDs allows for the evaluation of a product’s carbon emissions, supporting the climate health portion of the pledge.
Looking Toward 2030 and Beyond
Through continuous improvement in our business, we hope to improve the built environment, and ultimately, society overall. We're working hard to lead the industry with transparency documentation such as EPDs, Health Product Declarations, and Declare Labels. But we're not stopping there. We're fostering collaboration in our broader building, construction, and design space to help create a better built environment.
GAF Sustainability Goals
The 21 new EPDs are an important milestone toward our GAF 2030 Planet Goals, which have four focus areas: increase product transparency, reduce carbon emissions, drive product circularity, and divert operational waste.
By 2030, we plan to publish EPDs for our entire commercial and residential core product portfolio. As we've scaled the GAF EPD creation process, we better understand the environmental impact of each stage in our products' life cycles. This has made our teams excited and hopeful because we significantly increase our internal and external sustainability opportunities as we publish and learn from our transparency documentation.
Excited to explore more sustainable design solutions? You can find GAF’s most recent EPDs here. You can learn more about how GAF is investing in our people, our planet, and progress for a more sustainable future, here.