Perspectives on greener product development and manufacturing from Sustainable Minds, our partners, customers and contributors.

Life cycle assessment

Transparency is the New Green in Product Selection and Specification Part 17: GAF & Isolatek

By Sustainable Minds on September 27, 2020

Recorded September 24, 2–3pm

Welcome to our webinar series featuring building product MFRs making credibly greener & healthier products. Whether you're a MFR or an AECO you'll find value in hearing these product and marketing leaders share stories about their transparency journeys, strategies and innovations.

This week's stories are particularly interesting to hear together, one that's been investing in transparency for years and one that's more recently started.

Transparency is the New Green in Product Selection and Specification Part 16: Excel Dryer on Air vs. Paper PLUS Transparency Catalog v3.0 sneak preview!

By Sustainable Minds on July 24, 2020

Recorded Tue, Jul 21, 2–3pm ET

Welcome to our webinar series featuring building product MFRs making credibly greener & healthier products. Both MFRs and AECOs will find value in hearing product and marketing leaders share stories about their transparency journeys, strategies and innovations.

For over 50 years, Excel Dryer has been manufacturing the finest American made hand dryers featuring the XLERATOR® Hand Dryer.
Visit the Showroom.

Transparency is the New Green in Product Selection and Specification, Part 15: National Gypsum & FLEXCO

By Sustainable Minds on June 25, 2020

Recorded Tue, Jun 23, 2–3pm ET

Welcome to our webinar series featuring building product MFRs making credibly greener & healthier products. Whether you're a MFR or an AECO you'll find value in hearing these product and marketing leaders share stories about their transparency journeys, strategies and innovations.

Transparency is the New Green in Product Selection and Specification, Part 14: Intl. Cellulose, ISE Logik & Unilock

By Sustainable Minds on May 19, 2020

Recorded Thu, May 14, 12–1pm ET

Welcome to our webinar series featuring building product MFRs making credibly greener & healthier products. Whether you're a MFR or an AECO you'll find value in hearing these product and marketing leaders share stories about their transparency journeys, strategies and innovations.

Join us to learn about

  • Which products have disclosures; what they learned and been doing to improve
  • Project & application stories
  • Using product transparency to make better informed specification decisions
  • How to use the Transparency Catalog – Do more in 1 click!

Transparency is the New Green in Product Selection and Specification: Using the EC3 tool & Transparency Catalog to make lower embodied carbon decisions

By Sustainable Minds on April 8, 2020

Recorded Thu, Apr 2, 2–3pm ET

Using EPDs to make decisions about which products have better environmental performance isn't simple, but now there’s the EC3 tool.

Since going live at Greenbuild 2019, 5,000+ people have signed up for Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) accounts! The EC3 tool is a collaborative, open-source industry-led sustainability platform that helps professionals make better decisions about embodied carbon in construction, and enables supply chain accountability.

Transparency is the New Green in Product Selection and Specification, Part 13: BASF & USG

By Sustainable Minds on March 6, 2020

Recorded Wed, Feb 26, 2–3pm ET

Welcome to our webcast series featuring manufacturers making credibly greener and healthier products. Learn how they are working to understand and improve the environmental performance and material health of their products.
Check out the BASF and USG listings.

Transparency is the New Green in Product Selection and Specification: 2020 Product Transparency Trend Report

By Sustainable Minds on February 25, 2020

Recorded Tue, Feb 18, 2–3pm ET

From Early Mainstream to Specification Requirement

Today, there are 1,270+ MFRs producing thousands of transparency disclosures (EPDs & material ingredient) across 21 CSI MasterFormat® divisions.

Since the 2016 launch of the Transparency Catalog, Sustainable Minds has tracked the demand for, and creation of, product transparency disclosures. Increasingly, architects, contractors, engineers and owners have become more knowledgeable about what the disclosures mean. Environmental performance and material health are performance criteria. To design and construct actually higher-performing buildings, actually higher-performing products must be specified.

The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator Tool methodology: Not just what, but why? Not just how, but how big can the impact be?

By Sustainable Minds on November 18, 2019

The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool methodology takes several bold steps to use what program operators, LCA providers and manufacturers have worked very hard to produce. Product category rules (PCRs) using different parameters to define product categories or groups; inconsistent content and data in an environmental product declaration (EPD), and PDF delivery in non-standardized layouts all make it very complicated to machine read and digitize to put today’s available data to use. Notwithstanding, this methodology delivers, for the first time, a scalable way to compare a single product’s embodied carbon impacts to all other similar products in a category.

Join us to meet experts on embodied carbon & EPDs @ our Greenbuild booth talks

By Sustainable Minds on November 18, 2019

We’re excited to be announcing several important new partners. Sign up for booth talks.

Sustainable Minds offers the opportunity for demos and discussion F2F with the people doing the work! If you're in Atlanta, come to Booth #1713 to learn from our partners.
Check out the schedule and RSVP >

Sustainable Minds Announces Transparency Catalog v2.0: Powerful MasterFormat® Filtering and Every Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) in North America

By Sustainable Minds on January 23, 2019

The first cloud-based productivity solution for Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Owners (AECOs) to make it super easy to find & specify greener and healthier products for high-performance buildings — and reward manufacturers for making them.

Cambridge, MA — January 23, 2019 — Sustainable Minds® (SM), recognized leaders in customer-centered product sustainability cloud solutions, today announced the availability of the Transparency Catalog v2.0, continuing the company’s commitment to deliver simple, easy to use and powerful tools. Flexible MasterFormat® number filtering, aligned with MasterSpec® sections, enables AECOs to find exactly the brands, products and transparency disclosures, in each division and section, to meet project and green building rating system requirements. This makes it possible to do in minutes what today takes weeks, or wouldn’t even be possible to do at all.