Green Builder Media CEO Sara Gutterman talks with Ferguson's Stephanie Vega Ziegler and Kohler's Amy Davies about environmental product declarations, what separates a high-quality EPD from a weak one, and the cost and third-party verification hurdles manufacturers face.
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Sara Gutterman: I'm here today with Stephanie Vega Ziegler, director of environmental product strategy for Ferguson, and Amy Davies, director of business development for sustainable living at Coachella. Today we're going to talk about environmental product declarations or EPs. Let's go ahead and dive in. I have some questions for you, Steph. Tell us what is need and why is it important?
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Stephanie Vega Ziegler: Sure. Thank you. And I'd say I think of an EPD as a nutrition label for a product or building material. So as you said, it stands for Environmental Product Declaration. And it really is a standardized document that communicates the environmental performance and human health of a product over its lifetime. And it's really based off of the results of a products lifecycle assessment, which really an LKA assesses the potential environmental impact throughout a products lifecycle, from natural resource acquisition to production and use stage, and ultimately to the end of life disposal or recycling of that product.
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Stephanie Vega Ziegler: And so, and another thing I'd like to just kind of peg on to that is that a key component of an EP are PCR, which is a product category rule. And these rules really outline what data needs to be collected for a specific type of product. So as a result, an EPD enables a standard of comparison between different products in the same category.
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Stephanie Vega Ziegler: So that this is why EPs are important, because they offer us the ability to compare products and ultimately make selections that have the least environmental impact. The EPD itself doesn't actually make a product more sustainable. It's really understanding that comparison between two different products.
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Sara Gutterman: Thanks, Steph. That's helpful. So, Amy, the process of verifying the product with an environmental product declaration is not totally streamlined. So tell us about the color products that have ePDM. And were these products specifically designed with sustainability in mind? Did you redesign existing products to enhance their sustainability or did you start from scratch?
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Amy Davies: So thank you.
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Amy Davies: Sarah, for having me.
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Amy Davies: So I.
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Amy Davies: Would say it's all the above.
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Amy Davies: For Koehler.
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Amy Davies: We've been on this journey of product sustainability for a very long time. And so when we first started learning about EDS and the need of our customers to have this documentation, we certainly took existing products to go through a testing process and gathering that data in order to inform the EP, which would say, you know, what is the the makeup and material set and longevity and carbon footprint of that product.
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Amy Davies: And as we have continued to evolve and our customer needs have evolved, we've had to look at our existing portfolio and identify where we can improve from an environmental sustainability standpoint in terms of how we make those products. And so we do have a set of products that would have gone through a re-engineering process to become more sustainable.
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Amy Davies: And then we also will go through the process of our brand new products that we bring to market every year to ensure that they are meeting the the standards that we set for ourselves and that are following certain standards like water sense, so that we have products that are meeting those sustainability needs of our customers through our new product portfolio.
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Amy Davies: So it really is a range of products, you know, that we have from, you know, original products that we just went through the testing to, to see where we were at as a baseline. And then where did we have to evolve an engineer and then innovate new products throughout the process to be able to give our customers the solutions that they need?
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Sara Gutterman: Thanks, Amy. Steph. Not all are created equal. Talk about high versus low quality and specifically what makes an EPD high quality.
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Stephanie Vega Ziegler: Sure. So first, it's critical that each EPD provides the lifecycle assessment results specific to that single product only if a lifecycle assessment or LCAs produced for a group of products, it averages the results of all products in that same family, which ends up making some look better than they should. And then second, and hopefully this is pretty obvious that at any high quality, PD will always include all stages of the product life cycle.
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Stephanie Vega Ziegler: Finally, high quality EVs present declarations for specific data, so this guarantees that the results are based on actual supplier data rather than less accurate. And industry or global averages.
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Sara Gutterman: And give us an example. How does Koehler ensure that your product deeds are high quality, and how do you also ensure accountability and transparency? How do you back up your claims? Yeah, absolutely. So we look at a set of criteria when we evaluate the sustainable attributes of a product. And so that will include its carbon footprint, its water usage, its waste impact, its chemical impact.
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Amy Davies: So there's a whole host of environmental attributes that we evaluate for for the products that we bring to market. And certainly through the process of going through an EP application, we utilized third party verification firms to validate the data that we collect for our products before we actually publicize an EP of our products. So those third party verification, that process is really important to us because it does provide that transparency and that consistency that we are we're not creating our own benchmarks.
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Amy Davies: We're looking to that third party verification firm to do that, to assess the the data and to ensure that we meet the requirements, you know, to enable them to be created. Steph, what are some of the challenges Ferguson is facing with respect to accessing products with for distribution through your channels?
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Stephanie Vega Ziegler: Yeah. As we've discussed, one of the most impactful reasons for having EPD is that they really enable us to compare products to one another. Of course, this requires that each product has an APB, and unfortunately, not all suppliers currently have EPD for their products. So and they are quite costly. So it is an investment for an organization to begin to look under the hood, if you will, of how how these products are manufactured.
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Stephanie Vega Ziegler: But it does give us a really exciting opportunity to influence the industry by highlighting the work that we're doing with polar as it relates to Ferguson exclusive products that carry. Now, with the collaboration that we've endeavored over the last several months. So we're confident that that will spur more suppliers to embrace. But ultimately, it's what the market demands, and that's what will truly move the needle.
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Stephanie Vega Ziegler: So the more we get requests from designers or builders, architects, engineers for these kinds of for this kind of documentation, the more manufacturers and suppliers will be, will will have an incentive to create these kinds of documents associated with their products.
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Sara Gutterman: And, Amy, what were some of the challenges Koehler faced when getting for your products? You know, having a process internally of being able to understand the environmental footprint of our products at the scale that we operate in itself was a Herculean challenge, you know, to to be able to execute lifecycle assessments at our scale has taken us 15 years to get to where we're at today.
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Amy Davies: And, you know, we're excited to share that will be complete with that process and just a few more years. I would say today, our challenges is having the, the third party verification companies with the right capacity to be able to meet the demand that we are now seeing from our customers for this documentation. So while we are able to supply those third party verifiers with the information, we're leaving it in their hands to be able to verify it and to supply us with the actual documentation.
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Sara Gutterman: And that has been challenging just given the sheer demand and interest in EPD documentation from our customers. So navigating that has been a more recent challenge for us. Wonderful. Well, Steph, Amy, thank you both so much for being here with me today. Very interesting conversation, and we look forward to continuing the dialog as the world of evolves.