Amid main plant updates (together with at a gypsum plant set to be the primary zero-carbon drywall manufacturing facility in North America), CertainTeed can be weaving sustainability into its specifier relations. The corporate’s supervisor of utilized constructing science, Lucas Hamilton, shares how.
Specify: Given at present’s world provide chains, studying each ingredient that’s in a constructing materials is difficult. How do you flip all that knowledge into one thing significant?
Lucas Hamilton: It’s important to do an excessive amount of homework. A few of that homework can embody life cycle assessments (LCA) for merchandise. LCAs are much like creating a private stock as you may do when dealing with a life occasion. You provide you with a considerable amount of data that must be evaluated and acted upon. LCAs seize the holistic affect of a product, from the power concerned within the extraction of the uncooked supplies to the manufacturing, to the transportation, to the set up, to the affect it can have on the constructing and the disposal or recycling after its helpful life.
As we go ahead, all constructing professionals will have to be acquainted with LCA language and perceive consider an LCA.
Specify: How is CertainTeed altering the best way specifiers have interaction with its merchandise?
LH: CertainTeed is making the method for specifiers extra environment friendly by means of transparency and accessibility. Builders, designers, and designers can work collectively to assist advocate sustainable constructing supplies to their purchasers. That’s why we provide an intensive assortment of constant training models (CEUs) by means of the CertainTeed Constructing Data Academy of Persevering with Schooling (ACE).
As well as, CertainTeed is each a sponsor and a member of the Development Specs Institute (CSI). Teams like CSI assist the corporate be taught extra about what specifiers want, are searching for, and reply any questions alongside the best way. In return, this enables us to undertake new practices when sharing data with specifiers.
Specify: In what particular methods do you present transparency?
LH: Most CertainTeed merchandise include a Well being Product Declaration (HPD), an inventory of contents and related well being data for merchandise used within the constructed atmosphere, and third-party-verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), which disclose the life-cycle environmental efficiency of merchandise.
Additionally, our Ecomedes-powered website, which we share with fellow manufacturers beneath mother or father firm Saint-Gobain North America, is a instrument that specifiers can use to seek out the knowledge they want in a single place. Ecomedes supplies patrons with a complete place to acquire product, and efficiency and sustainability options for almost all of CertainTeed’s merchandise. Data offered contains all eco-label certifications, ranking system contributions, product identifiers, recycled content material and reusability, product photographs, manufacturing places, hyperlinks to simply facilitate buying, and extra.
Specify: How do you help sustainable design by means of your product improvement?
LH: CertainTeed shares the identical mission of its mother or father firm Saint-Gobain to be a pacesetter in gentle and sustainable constructing supplies. Our constructing supplies are created with the longer term in thoughts, fairly than specializing in widespread traits, to make sure that the merchandise keep their sturdiness, look, and efficiency for years to return.
Specify: Along with materials transparency, evidently factories are being tweaked to scale back embodied carbon.
LH: From a company perspective, CertainTeed has been investing in renewable power for a few years. Lately, the corporate invested $91 million to improve its Montreal gypsum plant to grow to be the primary zero-carbon drywall plant in North America. We now have additionally invested in different renewable power sources comparable to photo voltaic farms and wind fields.
Internally, CertainTeed has an inside value related to carbon. This value is integrated into enterprise selections as a part of the continual enchancment of its merchandise to find out how they will lower their environmental affect. Moreover, CertainTeed and Saint-Gobain North America have launched a circular-economy enterprise to speed up reuse and repurpose end-of-life supplies.
Specify: What are the corporate’s long-term sustainability targets?
LH: We hope that these investments encourage others within the trade to entry and undertake extra sustainable enterprise practices. Looking forward to 2050, Saint-Gobain goals to grow to be carbon impartial, pushed by the aim of “making the world a greater house.”
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