Sustainable Minds and the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator Tool partner to simplify finding and specifying lower embodied carbon construction materials

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Collaboration will help building professionals make smarter procurement decisions that drive climate action, while making it easier and less expensive for manufacturers to create environmental product declarations (EPDs) that provide more specific data

Georgia World Congress Center, ATLANTA – November 19, 2019 – Today with the public beta release of the much-anticipated Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool, the Sustainable Minds (SM) Transparency Catalog [2] now includes the EC3 tool [3] results making it super easy for architects, engineers, owners, construction companies (AECOs) to find lower embodied carbon (EC) products in every MasterFormat® section in 1 click, and in a glance. They can find all EPDs from a manufacturer with the EC3 tool result, which links directly to the EC3 tool to enable comparisons within the category or to start modeling a project. In the EC3 tool, manufacturer and EPD pages link to their listing in the Transparency Catalog for product and contact information to connect the last mile and help get the product into the specification.

The EC3 tool is a free, open-access tool for AECOs, building material manufacturers and policy makers to easily evaluate and reduce EC emissions from construction materials to reduce EC within buildings at scale. The innovative methodology delivers a scalable way to use the global warming potential data in EPDs to compare a product’s embodied EC to others in its category. The EC3 tool is being incubated by the Carbon Leadership Forum and developed with the support of nearly 50 industry partners.

The Sustainable Minds Transparency Catalog now includes the EC3 tool results making it super easy for architects, engineers, owners, construction companies to find lower embodied carbon products in every MasterFormat® section in 1 click, and in a glance. They can find all EPDs from a manufacturer with the EC3 tool result, which links directly to the EC3 tool to enable comparisons within the category or to start modeling a project.

Tools are only as good as the underlying data. Today’s EPDs do not effectively deliver understandable, meaningful and actionable information largely due to lack of standardized reporting and delivery. Data is encoded in PDFs making it difficult to put to work. Additionally, it is common for a single EPD to cover an entire product family made at multiple facilities and report averaged results, which makes knowing the actual EC impacts for a specific product for a building in a specific location uncertain. The EC3 tool methodology rewards product and plant-specific EPDs because the data is reporting actual impacts.

“Sustainable Minds is a cloud software solutions company and an EPD program operator with the intent to make environmental reporting simpler, more understandable, standardized and digital. Our mission is to give people the knowledge to think differently empowering them to act differently with easy to use tools that fit into current workflows. Integrating the EC3 tool embodied carbon results into the Transparency Catalog provides a credible way to compare individual products to category performance, which is what AECOs have been begging for. The EC3 tool is more than an embodied carbon calculator. It has the potential to instigate massive changes in today’s EPD reporting system and we are excited to partner with such an innovative organization to make it happen.”
– Terry Swack, Sustainable Minds Founder & CEO

For manufacturers, SM is introducing affordably priced, simpler and standardized product & facility-specific EPDs to improve EC results in the EC3 tool and for Buy Clean CA Act [4] awarding authorities. Delivered in the cloud, into the EC3 tool and in PDF, these EPDs are for manufacturers who:

• Have participated in an industry-wide EPD and would like their own product-specific EPD
• Have multi-product EPDs and would like individual product EPDs
• Need new EPDs for a single product made at multiple facilities 

"The embodied carbon of building materials offers large opportunities to reduce climate change impacts. When we equip professionals with actionable information that fits in their workflow, they gain important insights to influence procurement decisions, changing the market and creating clean business cases worldwide. Sustainable Minds has long been a leader in creating simple, easy to use product transparency reporting tools and is a very valuable partner.”
– Phil Northcott, CEO, C Change Labs, EC3 tool developer

The Sustainable Minds Transparency Catalog is the first cloud-based productivity solution for AECOs to make it super easy to find & specify greener and healthier products for high-performance buildings — and reward manufacturers for making them. Curated by SM’s experts, it is the single source for AECOs to access all publicly available EPDs for building products used in North America, representing products in 21 CSI MasterFormat® [5] divisions, the North American standard for organizing specifications for commercial and institutional building projects.

SPECIAL NOTE: November 20–21 at the Sustainable Minds Greenbuild booth #1713, join us for several informal talks about the EC3 tool and SM’s new offerings. https://www.eventbrite.com/o/sustainable-minds-28133301159 [6]

Read the full story [7]: The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3 tool) methodology: Not just what, but why? Not just how, but how big can the impact be?

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About Sustainable Minds® 
Founded in 2007, Sustainable Minds’ product transparency cloud software solutions and services help manufacturers design and market greener products. They also make it super easy for building professionals to find & specify greener and healthier products for high-performance building projects — and reward manufacturers for making them. In 2013, the company introduced its award-winning SM Transparency Report™, an innovation in EPD delivery and became a program operator to create standardized tools that make product transparency easier to understand and more effective. Today the company is a leader in B2B cloud product transparency solutions and content for building product manufacturers and AECOs.

Follow the company @sustainablemnds [8] and learn more at transparencycatalog.com [9].

Contact: Jennifer Larkin, Jennifer@sustainableminds.com [10]