EDP documents

I would agree with you David- The LCA information included in an EPD provides some of the data requested, primarily in the Potential Environmental Impacts section, however I have found a product's Materials Safety Data Sheet to be the most beneficial when documenting this credit. 

I don't believe there will be a one-stop shop resource from a manufacturer to fully document this credit, which I think makes sense for an integrative analysis of a building material. 

This credit was an interesting exercise. The material safety data sheet and EPD do provide some overlapping information, but the Safety data sheet contains more detailed information about human impacts. The LCA in the EPD focuses more on the effects of product extraction to end of life. Both are necessary to document this credit. 

I did find EPDs extremelly useful for the environmental portion but surprisingly the older versions of the EPDs. It looks like they allowed for more manufacturer's qualitative description of impacts on the product life cycle stages and broke down the environmental impacts accordingly whereas on other or latter versions of the EPDs you see quantitative data only for the Life Cycle in its totallity. This makes sense as that is the original intent of the report and it made it easier and faster to compare but on excercises like this additional information might need to be re-incorporated into the reports. 

Look at the EPD for Ultima Ceilings by Armstrong and to Interface's Super Flor EPD for an example of two BPDO compliant EPDs that have different levels of details. 

Has anyone used information from a manufacturer's corporate sustainability report (CSR), in additon to the EPD, HPD, and SDS, to complete the Excel spreadsheet? I found some useful information in a few CSRs regarding Potential Environmental Impacts during the manufacturing phase. While it wasn't very detailed, it provides general information and I appreciated their transparency. And in most cases, the manufacturer used the GRI Standard. 

I agree. Finding the information that was required for the documentation is not easy. It would be great if more manufacturers started doing this type of reporting on their own products, since they will know the information better than anyone. 

I agree with the above comments that the EPDs we analyzed did not provide enough specifics on the environmental impacts to thoroughly complete the documentation without making some assumptions. We also found the products' Safety Data Sheets and HPDs to be more directly applicable to the documentation. Regardless, this credit was an eye-opening exercise that encouraged us to go beyond simply collecting EPDs and HPDs for the BPDO credits and critically review the selected products' associated impacts. It was a reminder that even though a product can have transparency documentation that contributes to LEED credits, its raw materials may still pose significant environmental and health impacts that should be scrutinized during the specification process. Hopefully more manufacturers will follow Sherwin William's footsteps in providing integrated analysis documentation so that design teams can more easily access impact information without the need to search for and reference multiple documents.