Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) are quickly becoming an essential part of the building design and construction processes. In 2024, CarbiCrete and Climate Earth, a leader in construction industry EPDs, developed a site-specific EPD for CarbiCrete’s pilot commercial production of cement-free concrete products at Patio Drummond.
Chris Erickson, the CEO of EPD leader Climate Earth, discussed the history of EPDs in Concrete Products magazine. Erickson notes that, in addition to US federal promoting the use of low-embodied carbon concrete verified via EPD, “many cities and 35 states are now, or are in the process of, developing low carbon standards for concrete. The implications of these changes are clear. Low carbon, measured by EPDs, has become a hard purchase metric and a business imperative for any concrete producer that wishes to participate in major projects around the country. “
EPDs are crucial for both manufacturers and product users, like architects, engineers, and designers, to demonstrate the sustainability of a building project through its choice of products. For a project to obtain LEED certification or other signifiers of improved environmental performance, specifying products with available EPDs can demonstrate a verified sustainability impact. Under LEED v4.1, using products with verified EPDs can help a building project receive up to 2 LEED points.
The Canadian low-carbon assets through life cycle assessment (LCA2) initiative, led by the National Research Council, convened from 2019-2023 to develop outputs to encourage low-carbon procurement, including a centralized repository for Canadian life cycle inventory (LCI) datasets of primary construction materials. The initiative also published national guidelines for whole-building life cycle assessments to assist project owners in implementation of carbon reduction strategies.
The LCA2 initiative’s primer for federal government procurement notes that embodied carbon can contribute up to 50% of a building’s total long-term emissions, and that “at 12 years embodied carbon is ~75%, and concrete ~40%, of the total emissions.”
The primer recommends various strategies to reduce a project’s embodied carbon, particularly through optimizing the cement content in the concrete used: “the amount of embodied carbon in concrete is primarily a function of how much cement is used in the mix.” By reducing cement use in the concrete mix, a project has the opportunity to greatly reduced its embodied carbon emissions.
In future years, EPDs will see increased adoption and regulation via legislative requirements. Although projects seeking LEED certification are likely to specify products with available EPDs, this is not yet a stipulated priority for more general projects. In the United States, EPDs are required for material suppliers in states including New York, New Jersey, and California, with more states moving toward requiring verifiable reductions in embodied carbon.
When it comes to concrete, precast concrete and masonry products show a vast improvement over ready-mix concrete in terms of environmental performance. This is clear when looking at precast and ready-mix concrete’s cradle-to-gate industry-wide EPDs: per tonne, Canadian precast concrete has a weighted average total global warming potential (GWP) of 256.3 kg CO2e, while Canadian ready-mix concrete has an industry average benchmark of 304.52 kg CO2e.
Climate Earth, a leader in on-demand EPDs that produces 95% of all concrete-related EPDs in North America, has developed an EPD that measures the environmental impact of CarbiCrete’s cement-free concrete masonry units (CMUs). The cradle-to-gate facility-specific EPD was produced using data gathered onsite at Patio Drummond, a leading concrete manufacturer and CarbiCrete’s initial commercial production partner. The EPD measures the environmental impact for CarbiCrete cement-free CMUs at 11.7 kg CO2e per cubic metre.
When compared to the Canadian Concrete Masonry Producers’ Association industry-wide EPD for CMUs manufactured in Eastern Canada, CarbiCrete represents an extraordinary improvement upon masonry’s already impressive environmental impact. The CarbiCrete process allows for a complete replacement of cement with an industrial byproduct, reducing embodied carbon while contributing to the principles of the circular economy.
