Nearly every one of Engineering News Record’s 2023 and 2024 ‘Top 5 Green Design Firms and Contractors by Sector’ across 8 sectors rely on the Transparency Catalog to support sustainability and decarbonization goals
BROOKLINE, Mass., Dec. 5, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — As the building industry intensifies its focus on decarbonization, the Sustainable Minds® Transparency Catalog™ continues to be a crucial resource for design and construction professionals. According to Engineering News Record, nearly all the organizations featured in both the 2023 and 2024‘Top 5 Green Design Firms and Contractors by Sector’, across 8 sectors, use the Transparency Catalog to effectively meet their sustainability and decarbonization objectives. Additionally, 90% of the Top 25 contractors and 75% of the top 50 in both Top 100 lists are Transparency Catalog users. This widespread traction underscores the Catalog’s importance in driving informed product choices that contribute to high-performance building practices.
How Embodied Carbon Fits into EPDs and Decarbonization
EPDs report the life cycle impacts of products and materials, making it possible to make better informed decisions. In an EPD, embodied carbon is one of the most prominent metrics, as it represents the ‘upfront’ emissions before the product is even put to use. Early-stage material and supply chain decisions are increasingly recognized as having the greatest impact on ‘carbon costs’, underscoring the importance of integrating sustainability from the start of the design process.
Easy access for design and construction organizations to products with EPDs means big benefits for building product manufacturers with EPDs.
Leopardo Construction works with a wide variety of green building rating systems, all of which recognize EPDs. “We use the Transparency Catalog frequently on our projects as it’s the quickest and easiest way to get embodied carbon data. It does a great job of taking the manufacturer data and outputting the salient metrics in a quick and easy to digest manner,” explained Patty Lloyd, LEED Fellow, WELL AP and Director of Sustainability at Leopardo Construction.
“One of the strategies in our internal Jobsite Sustainability Strategies Program is to gather EPDs from our subcontractor trades to educate them about EPDs as the fundamental building blocks of carbon accounting. We recently did a study of the materials that our self-perform department utilizes. As part of that study, we provided them with information about which of their typical products had the lowest embodied carbon, so that when asked to use a lower carbon material, they would have the knowledge to make the proper selection. The Transparency Catalog was used to gather all of those metrics.”
One of the largest coatings companies in North America, Behr Paint Company, recently published EPDs for the majority of their interior and exterior architectural coatings and selected the Transparency Catalog as the way to expand their reach into the high-performance building industry.
“As the first paint manufacturer to make our products available on the Transparency Catalog, we are thrilled to support project teams creating higher-performing and healthier buildings,” said Amber Jones, Director of Architect & Designer Strategic Initiatives at Behr Paint. “The Transparency Catalog aligns perfectly with our commitment to sustainability and we appreciate how it streamlines the research and selection process. It’s the only platform with a competitive analytics dashboard that gives us real-time visibility into the industry’s preference and demand for products with transparency information.”
“We’re extremely excited about ENR’s Top 100 Green Design Firms & Contractors report. It validates that we’re effectively reaching the people and organizations working to change the built environment. The industry relies on us to make environmental and material health data not just easy to find, but easy to use. Through our long-term partnership with Building Transparency and the EC3 tool, we make it easy to find the lowest carbon options in one click,” explained Sustainable Minds’ founder and CEO Terry Swack.
“No other product data platform has a data team like ours, with our method for aggregating and organizing EPDs to make it possible to select products with EPDs by type and embodied carbon results – in each MasterFormat® section,” said Swack. “At Greenbuild this year, people came to the booth just to thank us for the building Transparency Catalog!”
About Sustainable Minds
Sustainable Minds is the only end-to-end product transparency solutions provider for building product manufacturers today. The company is an ISO 14025 EPD / PCR program operator committed to understandable and reliable reporting; provides LCA, material evaluation and carbon accounting services, and delivers innovative digital tools to get products into projects. The Transparency Catalog™, the leading source of building & construction products for high-performance, low-carbon, healthier buildings, makes it super easy for industry professionals to collaboratively select, specify, and procure products, and reward building product manufacturers for making them.
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