Company Leads Low-Carbon Mastery In Fiber Cement Category

With an EPD, James Hardie Industries’ product quality goes hand-in-hand with transparency.

James Hardie Industries has no problem with its public image. On its website, the Dublin, Ireland-headquartered company proudly touts its position as “the world’s number one producer and marketer of high-performance fiber cement products.”

But when it came to demonstrating enviro-friendliness, James Hardie wanted the public and itself to have a clear view of exactly what it does to promote sustainability. Enter the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD)—a start-to-finish examination of how the company creates, markets and disposes of a product. 

According to James Hardie Marketing Manager Will Shea, an EPD would help the company “understand the real environmental impact of our products, as compared with perception,” create a baseline to evaluate improvement in that environmental impact over time, and create transparency with customers, homeowners, investors, and communities.

The company’s EPD for its fiber cement products, such as its Hardie lines, provides an opportunity to demonstrate a commitment to transparency, according to Shea. This includes communicating about the full life cycle impact of products, such as the importance of recarbonation—a natural process where cement reacts with the air and reabsorbs carbon dioxide (CO₂) gradually over the life of the product. 

Recarbonation is one place where James Hardie’s EPDs stand out from its competitors, Shea notes. Another is how the company opts to consider the environmental impact of a product during its entire lifetime—a.k.a., Cradle-to-Grave—versus the incomplete Cradle-to-Gate (up until it’s ready for the consumer) approach taken by other manufacturers.

The EPD notes that Cradle-to-Grave is a more-complex, more-expensive life cycle assessment than Cradle-to-Gate. But it’s the best approach for evaluating a product’s impact across its full life cycle.

Cradle-to-Grave is the most-efficient form of environmental information for making informed sustainability decisions, and it helps James Hardie customers contribute to environmental rating and certification schemes such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). It’s also a valuable marketing tool for the manufacturer and builders.

The results of the EPD led to the company’s Low Carbon Cement Technology Roadmap, which was “developed and is being implemented as a result of understanding the full impact of our product, and the opportunity to drive that impact down,” Shea notes.

Globally, the cement used to build dwellings such as a house or office building accounts for one-third of the structure’s embodied carbon or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. 

James Hardie’s roadmap charts the company’s course to a 50 percent reduction in product-related CO₂ emissions by 2030 via development of a lower-carbon cement with better recarbonation, collaboration with other researchers, production trials, and extensive consumer education efforts, according to James Hardie’s website. 

Thus far, the company is enroute to meeting a 15 percent reduction goal by fiscal year 2025.

“Our ultimate goal is to maintain leadership in the fiber cement industry and lead the future in a low carbon economy,” the company notes. “We are committed to updating our roadmap as more data, insights, and innovative technologies become available.”