“Better Materials” Simplifies Search and Documentation for HPDs, EPDs, and More

If you’ve attempted the Building Product Disclosure and Optimization (BPDO) credits under LEED v4 or 4.1, you probably have war stories about finding, verifying, and documenting those credits—and then potentially having your environmental product declarations (EPDs) or Health Product Declarations (HPDs) rejected because of something you missed in the fine print.

All that frustration is about to go away. Meet the Better Materials initiative from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI).

Several major search engines on one platform

Introduced at Greenbuild 2019 in Atlanta, the program has two major features. The first is a meta-database that brings together several existing search engines on one platform. Currently available are UL Spot, Origin, and Ecomedes, and USGBC is promising more databases in the coming months.

“Unified Search is not a new product database,” emphasizes an announcement shared with LEEDuser. “Simply put, instead of opening each platform separately and searching for the same product on each platform, Unified Search allows project teams to search for the same products across all platforms in one go.”

The advantage? You don’t have to go to several different websites poking around for products with EPDs, HPDs, or other documentation. Better Materials supports search for:

• BPDO - Environmental Product Declarations
• BPDO - Sourcing of Raw Materials
• BPDO - Material Ingredients
• Low Emitting Materials

GBCI pre-verification

But LEEDusers have expressed dissatisfaction with some of these databases on our forums: they say that the databases can sometimes claim products have documents that meet LEED criteria, but then these same documents get rejected by GBCI.

“We are asking everyone to become material experts and to decipher all the complex material reports,” explains the announcement. That’s about to end, with a new GBCI pre-screening. GBCI will work directly with manufacturers to verify that documents are LEED compliant. A few products have already gone through the process, but this is something that will take time to build out. (Manufacturers will pay for the screening, with pricing to be determined.)

A huge plus? You don’t actually have to upload any of the documents that have been pre-verified. You just have to enter an ID number in the calculator, which GBCI will automatically accept as your documentation.

This not a certification system for products, but rather the same screening GBCI already does for each document. The new system should save time for reviewers as well as for project teams.

“We want to make the search for better materials smarter, more predictable, and more transformative to the industry,” says the announcement. “Our vision is that everyone, everywhere should have access to better materials.”