Manufacturers are increasingly losing deals with building developers by letting their products get assessed with industry “average” carbon data. Let’s break this down.
Carbon limits are coming into force across Europe for all new construction.
Several countries already have set rules and limits, while many developers elsewhere are voluntarily embracing them.
Even if your home market isn’t yet caught up, manufacturers have to be ready for these requirements in their export markets.
The best way to be ready is with independently verified Environmental Product Declarations, which support the requirements set out in the EU’s new Construction Products Regulation for transparent and verified environmental data on building products.
So what if, as a manufacturer, you don’t yet have EPDs ready?
Buyers then have to use “average” default data when calculating the embodied carbon in your products.
That might not sound too bad, especially if you think your production processes are quite average (or worse) in terms of carbon efficiency anyway.
But these averages don’t match the averages of manufacturers with published EPDs - for good reason.
The default data that building developers rely on in the absence of an EPD should never risk underestimating the carbon impact.
And so it is industry average data - BUT with the assumption that the manufacturer is following the lowest efficiency processes.
You could have a key supplier literally next door, but be getting assessed on the transport cost using the industry average for manufacturers who have that key supplier on the opposite side of the planet.
On top of that, there are also safety margins often added.
The rules are a bit different depending on the category of product but the aim is always to ensure that default industry average data is an overestimate compared to independently verified manufacturer-specific data.
I took a totally random example here and opened up the first EPD I came across.
It’s a gypsum board that generates 0.22 kg of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent gasses), according to its EPD.
If that EPD didn’t exist then the default for a gypsum board is 0.31 kg of CO2e, even if it was produced more efficiently than this example.
It may sound a bit unfair, but the market needs manufacturers with trusted and transparent data.
An EPD is not a certificate of sustainability. It only presents verified numbers. But it helps manufacturers identify how to improve processes that lower embodied carbon and encourages them not to rely on those least efficient processes (which are often less financially efficient too).
And these numbers do increasingly affect which suppliers get chosen when other factors are relatively equal or if the developer is approaching the building carbon limit.
The irony is that manufacturers could be doing greenwashing in their marketing while simultaneously doing “green hushing” in their data that actually matters for sales.
As markets move toward verified carbon data based on common standards, we must eliminate both.
So manufacturers who embrace this sooner rather than later will have a competitive advantage.