November 28, 2018
On November 14th, 2018, UL launched the industry’s first Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) Optimization Credit program, responding to five years of demand for EPD Optimization since the launch of LEED v4 in July 2013. UL’s program enables manufacturers to make their existing EPDs even more valuable by providing insight into products’ reduced environmental impacts in comparison with the category average or previous product versions.
How It Works
The program leverages existing EPDs to credibly demonstrate a manufacturer’s impact reductions across its products’ value chain and is particularly valuable for earning LEED v4 credits for Building Product Disclosure and Optimization – Environmental Product Declarations Option 2, which will earn an additional full point for optimized EPDs
In addition to using existing EPDs, the EPD Optimization program uses new information to compare the EPD against a published industry average EPD for a particular category of products and evaluate a product’s performance against a previously published version of the same product – enabling companies like Interface and Kohler, who lead the industry by piloting the program, to credibly demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and transparency.
Whether you’re interested in demonstrating the environmentally preferable performance of your products or making them available for the new LEED v4 credit, UL can help. UL’s EPD Optimization provides manufacturers with a way to meet the LEED v4 credit for building product disclosure in a confident, credible way. For more information, contact us at environment@ul.com.