Sustainability Practice Group Notes: Should CSI produce standardized forms for Environmental Product Declarations?

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• On: 05/08/2009 10:05:12
• In: Sustainability Practice Group
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The practice group’s next meeting will be held May 28, 2-3pm ET. Join the group – it’s FREE!

April’s meeting quickly turned into an open discussion between construction professionals who view projects from both the designer’s perspective and the manufacturer’s.

The practice group’s next meeting will be held May 28, 2-3pm ET. The group expects to continue discussing EPD forms, and Kalin and Meyers will share what they’ve learned from the forms sent to them by participants. Join the group – it’s FREE! The Sustainability Practice Group plans to hold a face-to-face meeting at CONSTRUCT2009 & The CSI Annual Convention in Indianapolis on Wednesday, June 17, 8-9:30am. Register for this event when you register for CONSTRUCT.

Specifier Karen Joslin said she is looking for a better way to collect information from manufacturers. She’s using forms she’s developed herself, but she believes the process could be streamlined for the industry. She believes that if CSI could help gather specific, non-interpretive, technical information, it would help her and the manufacturers she’s querying.  Several participants thought that CSI’s GreenFormat should go a long way to solving this problem.

"If it could be clear and concise and very brief, I think that would be really helpful to the manufacturers,” she said.

Manufacturers and product representatives in the meeting also said they were frustrated with the industry’s approach to product selection for sustainable projects, but their irritation is with green certification programs that highlight only a few attributes, putting potentially greener solutions at a disadvantage.

Melissa Vernon of Interface FLOR explained that if her product is designed to be longer lasting, then that should weigh in its favor when considering the environment. But certification programs like the USGBC’s LEED building certification program are only interested in select attributes.

"We need to stretch our view of what it means to be a sustainable product,” she said.

“That's the problem many manufacturers are facing. They're experts in their own field,” said Mark Kalin, FCSI, CCS, FAIA, SCIP, chairman of CSI’s Sustainability Practice Group. “They know about the durability of the product and other factors, but LEED is just using a few singled out attributes."

The USGBC is working on these problems, Joslin said. For example the next version of LEED takes a more comprehensive view of carpeting, and closes a loophole for low emitting flooring. Life cycle assessment is on LEED’s horizon, while cradle-to-cradle considerations are already in place. She also said that if the environmental impact of a decision is truly noteworthy, there are always LEED’s  Innovation in Design credits.

But as one participant put it, this means construction professionals must know how to “play the game” with points – not necessarily how to build a high performance facility.

Part of “playing the game” is balancing LEED requirements against state law, others said. In some states the design team must provide three product alternates that meet a spec, so the design team limits its sustainable product choices to “big, expensive stuff,” as one member put it. Finding green alternatives for smaller products just isn’t worth the time.

Participants were also frustrated with the inconsistency of the programs available to manufacturers for sharing the sustainable attributes of their products. It’s too expensive for a manufacturer to get listed in every available database, especially for small companies, they said, and designers worry that the databases are advertising-driven, and can’t be trusted.

CSI has introduced GreenFormat (www.greenformat.com), a new format that structures product data for sustainable products, Kalin said. Manufacturers that list on GreenFormat are able to link to it from their websites and direct the design team to their listing for a detailed breakdown of information.

“I’m here because of GreenFormat,” said Phil Gattis of Community Playthings. "I like the layout of GreenFormat, it allowed me to document real sustainable attributes that we have. We're a small manufacturer. We can’t possibly be in all these directories.”

But GreenFormat is best for design teams making a first sweep of the products available – even its pages of questions and lengthy checklists don’t cover all the issues a designer is trying to address. The design team can save time and energy by searching GreenFormat to narrow its choices, but will still have to ask manufacturers for details.

CSI Technical Projects Coordinator Sarah Meyers, CSI, said, “GreenFormat is flexible and the team that developed it is looking at adding more functionality, but it does take funding to maintain such a system.” CSI, which never endorses or gives preference to a particular manufacturer or product listing, has to charge enough money to pay for maintenance.

Participants wondered if CSI could do more.

CSI is uniquely qualified to start a dialogue between building manufacturers and professionals and take up this task, Kalin said. No other organization understands the conversation that takes place between the design team, the contracting team, manufacturers and the owner the way CSI does.

“I’m hearing that CSI needs to find a way to keep its members up-to-date about what's happening,” Kalin said. “Instead of 500 firms keeping their own databases, we need to use CSIWiki or something to feed into."

Joslin suggested the group consider developing EPDs related to specific LEED credits and other certification programs that manufacturers could complete and post on their websites.

"If we could come up with a format for exactly what needs to be provided for a particular credit, it would help,” she said. "I want something that gets me the right finish, the right durability, the right color pallet. The LEED attributes are just another consideration in the shopping bag. It's not to get the credit, it's to benefit the environment, and this is one way to do it.”

Kalin suggested a series of forms that could be added to CSI’s Forms, a collection of forms based on CSI’s Project Resource Manual that standardizes submittals, substitution requests, reporting logs, etc.
 
Several participants said they are using forms they’ve developed over the years, and the group was interested in talking about them further.

Anyone who has a form they use is urged to email it to Meyers at sjmeyers@csinet.org to help with the group’s next monthly meeting discussion. Participants who would like to try crafting text for such a form are invited to work in CSIWiki, where other participants can see and build on their work.

There could be a new set of CSI forms in this that address EPDs, Kalin said.

“It feels like we're in the wild, wild west sometimes,” he said.

"It's a very green wild, wild west," Joslin added.