Green Builder Media CEO Sara Gutterman talks with Jenni Galiotto, LP's director of sustainability and public policy, about the company's 41% cut in carbon intensity since 2019, biomass-powered manufacturing, carbon negative products, and 50-year warranties.
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Sara Gutterman: Sarah Gutman, CEO of Green Builder Media. And I'm here with Jenny Gallardo, director of sustainability and public policy for LP. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you, because I know that LP is doing some extraordinary things with respect to corporate sustainability and also product sustainability. So let's launch in and just talk about the fact that the building industry is decarbonizing across the entire value chain, from low carb products to reduce emissions manufacturing processes.
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Sara Gutterman: How is LP participating in this transformation?
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Jenni Galiotto: Absolutely. You know, LP always has the philosophy of do the right thing always. And that extends to our sustainability initiatives, in our manufacturing process and just in general for our energy usage. 80% of our energy comes from biomass. So we source a large part from natural resources. We've reduced our carbon intensity by 41% since our base year in 2019.
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Jenni Galiotto: That's where our scope one and two greenhouse gas emissions. And then finally we have our ePDM for our products. So we have eight apps that are all carbon negative. And that represents 75% of our net sales portfolio.
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Sara Gutterman: Can you talk a little bit about the carbon cycle within your products, how you work to ensure that they are low carbon from, say, cradle to gate, meaning until they are installed, and also what happens over time as they may be able to absorb more carbon because of the quality of the products themselves.
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Jenni Galiotto: Our manufacturing process, we try and keep at a low emissions so we, you know, use a lot of biomass and residual from the trees that we bring in. So 99% of the trees that we bring in are used, whether it goes into our product or whether it goes into our manufacturing process. So we're really kind of using every single piece to to make these products.
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Jenni Galiotto: And then, you know, transportation, looking at, you know, efficiency when it comes to, you know, our distribution, how we, you know, move products between different locations and just making sure we're constantly trying to improve, you know, logistics there. The other piece then is, you know, end of life. Our products have a 50 year warranty. And we know that they can, you know, sustain a long, durable life.
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Jenni Galiotto: And so, you know, people are getting a lot of use out of these products. And that also helps to contribute to the whole life cycle.
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Sara Gutterman: What trends are you seeing with respect to, say, product innovation or purchase behavior or the policy piece that are interesting and attention grabbing right now to you?
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Jenni Galiotto: You know, you're seeing a lot more in the space of net zero carbon built homes looking at embodied carbon over operational carbon. But I think probably the most interesting is around the a lot of the initiatives around like build clean and looking at those whole building lifecycle analysis. And you also have bike lane. But you know, we prefer Bill clean because Bill Queen is is a little bit more holistic.
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Jenni Galiotto: And, you know, by plane is kind of segmented into, you know, the different product offerings. So that's kind of, you know, where we're seeing the space go to.
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Sara Gutterman: Jenny, is there anything else that you'd like to share with our audience today?
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Jenni Galiotto: I'm really excited about, you know, the journey that LP continues to be on in regards to sustainability. You know, we're we're always striving to, you know, continue to improve and make our operations more efficient and, you know, do the right thing for the environment.