Building material suppliers have a number of options available to them, including life cycle assessments (LCAs), environmental product declarations (EPDs) and health product declarations (HPDs), to make their products attractive to companies pursuing LEED v4 certification, according to an environmental consultant and a third-party certifier.
Jim Mellentine, corporate sustainability manager for the Sustainable Solutions Corp., and Annie Bevan, certified analyst with GreenCircle Certified, said in a webinar that the use of HPDs to satisfy LEED v4’s Material Ingredients Reporting section is a particularly significant change from the last standard, LEED 2009. They said the demand for HPDs is growing because these publicly available documents fully disclose known hazards and include a cradle-to-cradle certification, Window Film reports.
The LEED v4 standard is set to officially launch at the GreenBuild expo, being held November 20-22 in Philadelphia, but more than 100 projects are already pursuing certification through the LEED v4 beta program. Furniture manufacturer Haworth just announced that its showroom in Bejing’s Parkview Green building is the first certified under the new standard.
LEED v4 endorses the Cradle to Cradle Certified Products program.