EPDs and Sustainability Requirements - PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Amandine Tragus and Jean-François Côté of   SOPREMA. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

Intro: Welcome everyone to Coffee Conversations. My name is Megan Ellsworth, and this is being brought to you by RoofersCoffeeShop and Soprema. Thank you all for being here, and we're excited to be talking about EPDs and sustainability requirements with the experts here at Soprema, Jean-Francois and Amandine. Let's get started. Just thank you Soprema for bringing this to our attention, this great topic and for sponsoring this Coffee Conversation. You guys really do great things in the industry and we're very lucky to be your company partner so thank you so much. Amandine. Let's start with you. If you could just tell us a little bit about you and what you do at Soprema.

Amandine Tragus: Yes, absolutely. First, thank you, I'm very excited to be here. My name is Amandine Tragus, I am the National Quality and Sustainability Manager at Soprema. I've been with Soprema for nearly 13 years now, starting out in France as an intern while working on my master's degree in Engineering and Environmental Sciences. In 2012, I moved to the United States to take on the role of quality manager in Gulfport, Mississippi and today I oversee the quality assurance departments at all of our manufacturing locations across the U.S. and I'm also leading our low carbon transition strategy, which is something I'm really passionate about, which ties me back to my background and experience.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow, incredible. Well, I'm just so glad you're here. You're such an expert in this area, so thank you for being here.

Amandine Tragus: Thank you.

Megan Ellsworth: Jean-Francois, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you?

Jean-François Côté: Sure. Thank you. Good morning everybody. I'm Jean-Francois Cote, you can call me JF, this is how I go in the industry. I've been with Soprema for 25 years now. I'm based out of Drummondville, Quebec, Canada, so I am Director of Standards and Scientific Affairs for Soprema Canada. I share similar responsibilities with Amandine regarding the sustainability aspects of Soprema's corporate and products stewardship. I have a background in chemistry, I'm a chemist. I've been involved in research and development over my career, but nowadays, what I do, I focus on standards development, building codes and sustainability efforts. I really try to connect the dots within the industry. I see familiar names in the attendees today. Welcome everybody. Happy to be here and look forward to talk to you a little bit more about EPDs.

Megan Ellsworth: Yay. Okay. Well, I'm definitely excited to learn more about EPDs today. I'm going to stop share right now. Okay, there we go. Let's dive right in. Amandine, let's talk about sustainability movement overall in roofing and the built environment. Can you just kind of set the scene for us?

Amandine Tragus: Yes. I think to start, it is important to mention that the build environment sector is by far the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It account at least 37 of the annual global emissions.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. Wow. That's-

Jean-François Côté: That is awesome. That's huge. And sustainability is getting today a reality. We can see a big trend. If you look a few years back, it was just a buzzword. It was just trying to get a glimpse of what this was. But you can tell today there's a gradual adoption of principles by many stakeholders in our industry. One thing to be said, because it's gradual that not everybody's at the same level of embracement, which makes things interesting. There's still a lot of education to provide to the industry.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, go ahead, Amandine.

Amandine Tragus: Jean-Francois is totally right. And I just also would like to add that companies that are not committed to reducing their carbon footprint today are part of the dwindling segments.

Jean-François Côté: And the interesting thing is that the roofing industry is sometimes labeled as a very conservative and slow-moving industry, but our industry has recognized the benefits of engaging in sustainability several years ago. Our industry was among the first industries to publish EPDs way back in 2014. We're at least 10 years in with an industry that's recognized most of the time to be somewhat of a slow mover. It's really great to see that this trend is being embraced by our industry.

Megan Ellsworth: That is, that's really cool. I didn't know that we were one of the first to bring this into the light. That's really cool.

Jean-François Côté: Yeah.

Amandine Tragus: Yes. Yes. And something to also keep in mind is that the world today is rapidly changing, and so are our customers needs. The construction material manufacturers are definitely, like Jean-Francois said, seeing a growing trend of requests for environmental product declarations from their customers. This trend is happening because people are becoming more and more aware of the impact of embodied carbon emissions. Just for example, some of our largest customers want to know their environmental impacts associated with the products we sell them.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Jean-Francois, how would you say the contractor and design communities are starting to meet around sustainability? I know there's cool roofs now, there's all sorts of different options for a more environmental building or house. How are they coming together, would you say?

Jean-François Côté: I think it's coming from different angles, and one of the things that we've noticed is that there's been a trend or a tendency to just look at one aspect at a time over the years. Like you said, there was a big push on cool roofs and white roofs and reflective roofs for quite a while, which is still important, but focusing on one aspect, one attribute of products was the way to go, say 10 years ago. Now we're getting more and more into multi-facets of the different products, looking at different angles and multi-attributes. EPDs are part of this trend, is that an EPD is also, we'll talk about this later, but it's intended to disclose environmental impacts in different categories in a wide variety of forms. It's making it a lot different than just looking at one aspect and focusing on, say, recycled content. Okay, you can have a product that has a great recycled content, but how is it impacting other aspects of the life cycle and everything? It makes it a more holistic approach today.
I think we're at the point where now we're seeing this being more and more elaborate and having more and more high-level conversations with people that get into the whole arena.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. It's really... That's so interesting. You have to look at it from a holistic point of view, like the whole building, the whole home or whatever. Amandine, can you level set for us what exactly is an EPD? Can you share with me?

Amandine Tragus: Yeah. The simplest way I can think of to explain what an environmental project declaration or EPD is is by comparing it to a nutritional facts level that you can find on the food packaging.

Megan Ellsworth: Got it.

Amandine Tragus: Except instead of showing nutritional information, an EPD discloses the potential environmental impacts of a product throughout its life cycle. Now for me to understand what an EPD is better, I think it's important to know what we mean by a product's life cycle. Essentially the life cycle of a product refers to the entire process a product goes through from the moment of extraction to the disposal, and there are four main stages. The first one will be the project stage, second construction stage, then new stage and finally end-of-life stage. To summarize pretty much what a EPD is, it's simply a way to transparently communicate a product's environmental impact.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow, okay.

Jean-François Côté: And if I may add, it seems it is a very complicated process. There could be all multiple ways to achieve disclosure of those environmental impacts, but in order to make sure that everybody does it the same way, there's a process that needs to be followed in order for this to happen. And that is under ISO standards. There are international standards that are being followed across the globe to disclose those environmental impacts within what we now call EPDs.

There's two types of EPDs. Basically, there will be product-specific or company-specific EPDs and industry average EPDs. Depending on the level of complexity and who gets involved, you could have specific EPDs that would cover products from a single manufacturer or even in some cases a single plant from a manufacturer where on the other side you will have industry average EPDs that will cover an entire product category into which the manufacturers of this product category will come together and input their data confidentially in a way to have somebody determine the environmental impacts of their products. And that was what I talked about earlier, 10 years ago what ARMA and SPRI and CFFA did in our industry because those associations were the first that ended up working on developing EPDs for our industry.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. Okay. How would you say this standardized report communicates the product's environmental impact?

Jean-François Côté: And please bear with us right now, there's going to be a lot of acronyms. We're going to be talking about EPDs being-

Megan Ellsworth: Got it.

Jean-François Côté: ... The first one we've talked about. An EPD is based on an LCA, which is developed under a PCR. Let's go from the initial stage to the final stage. The PCR is a product category rule. It's like the rule book. If you play any game, if you play any sport, you have a rule book that's the same. A PCR tells what are the rules by which you are going to be doing that whole process. From those rules an expert practitioner in lifecycle assessment will do a lifecycle assessment, an LCA. The LCA is the actual methodology that is being followed to model the processes by which products are being extracted, manufactured, installed, disposed of and so on. This whole process is under a lifecycle assessment, and this is what nourishes the information that ends up into an EPD. The lifecycle assessment is very complex process and contains sensitive information. EPDs are there to disclose what can be disclosed to the public into a normalized way.

Amandine Tragus: Yes, and this is why the product category rule or PCR is considered the backbone used to create a lifecycle assessment and ultimately, the EPD environmental project declaration. Building on what Jean-Francois just mentioned, a lifecycle assessment is basically a way to systematically measure a product's impact. It gives us the structure to identify and assess environmental impacts at every stage of the product's life. The LCA gives us a full picture of what goes into each stage of a product's lifecycle. Things like raw materials, fuels, electricity and water, but also what comes out like solid waste, VOCs, wastewater. The LCA tracks all these inputs and outputs and links them to the potential environmental impacts. The LCA is really the heart of an EPD. The EPD simply extracts the relevant information from the LCA and organizes it according to the format and guidelines that you found in the product category rule.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay.

Jean-François Côté: And results are expressed in a very systematic way. You have different categories of impact that are required to be disclosed in an EPD. The most recognized one, I wouldn't say the most important one, but that's the one that people relate the most, is the global warming potential. That's the carbon emissions, the carbon footprint of the product. This is the one that is related to climate change, to global warming and so on. I know that's a sensitive topic, and we're not going to elaborate on that, but that's the one that I guess most people are focusing their attention on, despite the fact that EPDs also have other disclosure requirements into ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication, smog formation. All those elements are required to be disclosed by the EPD in order for the readers of the EPDs to determine if this product or this product is their best bet into moving forward in the projects and the selection of products for what they're trying to accomplish.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a whole list of data that the EPD collects and shares. Jean-Francois, why? Why are they created? Why do we want them and need them?

Jean-François Côté: The reason for the existence of EPDs is that it is intended to disclose to the consumer, to the public the impacts of a product or family of products. The first driver for the creation of PCR and EPDs for construction materials was the lead program, the USGBC LEED Program. If you look at some of the credits that can be obtained for projects that seek a LEED certification, there is a series of credits including one that is on transparency, on material transparency and that credit awards one point when it is demonstrated for this given project that the project team has used at least 20 products covered by an EPD. It's a little bit more complex than that, but because not all EPDs weigh the same weight, but at the end of the day, you have to assemble in your project a series of products from a number of manufacturers that do have an EPD.

This is entailing the transparency, the disclosure of the impacts of the products in order to understand the choices made on the building construction materials and the impacts that they can have on the environment. This is the reason why the industries, the different industries, including ours, have initiated the development of EPDs back in 2014. Our industry wanted to ensure we would remain in the race for having products installed in projects that seek a LEED certification. Imagine if a project team is looking for products to have an EPD, and your industry doesn't have any, you run a risk of not being selected. It was a question of being able to survive in that market.

At the time, it was just, I would say a check the box exercise. Very few people really paid attention to the contents. An EPD could be as long as 15 pages long, so it can contain information that, do you really want to read through all this and all that. At the beginning, it was that. It was just, okay, I want my LEED credit. I'm going to use EPDs. I have them. I'm good. Over the years, more and more understanding of the impacts is obtained. And today there are firms that are specialized in whole building life cycle assessment, and the EPDs are used as an input to them to calculate the environmental impacts of the selected products onto a complete building. Of course, most of the studies today focus on global warming, carbon footprint than any other parameter, but everything is available now through the EPDs.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay.

Amandine Tragus: Absolutely. And I just would like to add on what Jean-Francois said. EPDs can help manufacturers stand out in the market by showing they care about sustainability. Nowadays, designers, contractors prefer to purchase projects from manufacturers who are transparent about their environmental impacts and by publishing an EPD manufacturers show they're committed to transparency, sustainability and strong environmental performance, which will set them apart from the competition.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. That is so, so true and that actually perfectly leads us into the next question. We got a question from Heather West, and that is, "What advice would you have for a roofing material manufacturer that is hesitant to invest in EPDs?"

Jean-François Côté: If you haven't seen today requests coming your way because people are looking for EPDs and would potentially not be interested in your products if you don't have them, I think it's a trend that's going to come your way. I don't think you want to be in that position that one of your clients will say, "Well, I would need your EPDs in order to maintain you in the race for the selection of products." For me, that is probably the biggest reason why you want to do this, because it gets to a point where manufacturers could be excluded from bidding. Public projects as well, we've seen a tendency with the new administration, we don't know where this is going to go, but we've seen so far the GSR and those public organizations that drive work in the public sector only selecting products based on their ability to provide transparent environmental information. That also is, for me, a big trendsetter to make sure that manufacturers start doing the right thing I'd say and get EPDs.

Amandine Tragus: Yes, and I fully agree with what Jean-Francois just said. An EPD is not only just a tool for the manufacturing facilities, it's also a response to a customer demand and customer who want to know the EM embodied carbon of the product we sell on part of a rapidly growing niche. If you're not able to provide that information, you probably at some point will begin to lose opportunities. We say regulations, they come, they go. Regulations also take a very long time to be implemented, but a customer demand can change overnight.

Jean-François Côté: Yeah.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, man, this is so good. We have so many questions coming in. Thank you everyone. I have another question from Laurie Jerome here. What if there is an industry-wide EPD for your category?

Jean-François Côté: Well, let's try to wrap this up easily. If there is an industry average EPD for your product category and a manufacturer isn't part of that industry average EPD, that's a problem because a manufacturer can only supply an EPD, an industry average EPD if they have participated in the development of that EPD. You cannot claim to have been considered and use the EPD if you haven't supplied your data into the whole mix. If there's one, that means that potentially there's been some misunderstanding somewhere, because the process by which an industry average EPD is developed includes reaching out to all stakeholders in that product category or segment of the industry and ensure that everybody has an opportunity to jump in and be part of it.

There is a process by which manufacturers can claim retroactive participation into an existing industry-wide EPD. Therefore, in that case, my recommendation would be to reach out to the program operator, which is the company that hosts that EPD. Program operators are, the ones that come to mind, NSF, UL, ASTM, those companies that publish the EPDs on behalf of the industries would be the ones to contact in order to see if you as a manufacturer can claim for retroactive participation.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. Follow up question from Laurie. If you have one from ARMA, for example, then you can use it?

Jean-François Côté: Oh, okay. If you're in a position like a client that is willing or wants to use EPDs, if you have an industry average EPD, it's providing you an average, a global average of the industry for that product category, say the ARMA EPDs for roofing shingles or for BUR, SBS or APP types, those would indicate you what is the industry average environmental impacts for the products. If you're doing this for a LEED program, industry average EPDs weigh less. You would not have a complete point by using an industry average EPD, you would have half a point. If you're looking at increasing the weight of an EPD, you would want to turn to a product-specific EPD that's worth the full point. It's really because the product-specific EPD coming from one manufacturer is going to be much more tight into the variation because there's only one manufacturer, not seven or eight manufacturers that pool their data together.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. Wow. The questions are rolling in. Keep them coming everyone. We have another one from John Boling from IIBEC. Hi, John. He says, "Good morning. Thank you for sharing your time and knowledge. Question, are plant-based EPDs expensive to complete or simply breaking down the numbers generated from a product EPD plus a little more work of course?"

Jean-François Côté: I would say that from a process standpoint, a product-specific or plant-specific EPD is a little bit less of time and effort because you only have one source of data. If you have an industry-average EPD, there are multiple sources of data. Not all manufacturers call raw materials the same way, or there's sometimes just weird things that happen when you work on an industry-average EPD that we need to all speak the same language in order to make sure we put the right numbers in the right columns. But at the end of the day, from an LCA practitioner standpoint, they still need to understand the process for manufacturing the product, where it is installed, how is it installed and so on.

The model for calculation of the environmental impacts remains the same, is just that the input data is a little bit less cumbersome to deal with on a product-specific or plant-specific EPD, but at the end of the process, you end up with a result that is far more precise if you only have one plant versus if you had to aggregate 7, 8, 10, 20 plants altogether. It definitely provides a value that is much more solid and have much less variability around the mean and average.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. Okay. Wow. Another question from Bill Almond, from the Adhesive and Sealant Council. Are industry-wide EPDs useful to companies slash accepted by specifiers and architects?

Jean-François Côté: Oh, they are. Yes, they are. And there are some industries that have very little product-specific EPDs out there. I think it's a matter of trying to find the right balance and transparency and your ability to stand out like Amandine was saying earlier. At Soprema, we decided that as much as possible we would... Well, the minute there's an industry-average EPD that's popping somewhere, we want to be in, we want to be part of that. And once this is done, we ask ourselves, is there a benefit to having our own product-specific EPD in addition to it? The answer to this question can be multiple ways.

One of which is again, in the LEED program, there is a credit that is obtainable if there is evidence that the products that are being used in a project are demonstrating a lower than average environmental impact in multiple categories. In order for this, you need to have a baseline, which would be the industry average EPD and a product-specific EPD that you will compare to the industry average. And if a manufacturer can demonstrate that their environmental impacts are lower than the average, there is an opportunity for that selection to give an extra credit, an extra point for the LEED program. There's multiple reasons for which groups develop industry average EPDs and why individual manufacturers on top of that do their own product-specific EPDs.

Amandine Tragus: Yes, and I think also it also depends on how transparent the manufacturer want to be with a customer. And I know we'll talk a little bit more about that later, and you will see that depending... I don't want to say too much because we're about to talk about it, but yes, I think it really depends also on how transparent you decide to be with your customer. And today we know that transparency is something that's becoming more and more important.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. Yeah, absolutely. How would you say companies are performing these life cycle assessments using a peer reviewed product category rules document?

Jean-François Côté: It's a long project. If you're looking to have an EPD next week, sorry, this is not going to happen. If you're lucky in a product category rule has already been developed for a product category that is either yours or consistent with the products that you're developing, you already have a head start. Otherwise, that's the first step. The development of a PCR requires that the industry around that product category gets together, and according to the ISO rules, develop the rule book. This is the first step. It can take a few months to do. It includes a public review. The program operator that is spearheading that process is going to, once the draft PCR is obtained, they will post it for public review and everybody has a chance to comment and try to correct any deficiencies that they would see in the PCR and then can start the life cycle assessment, which takes also quite a bit of time, depending on the ability of manufacturers to be able to locate the data. That is most of the time what is taking the most of the time, obtaining the data.

Where do you get your materials from? How are your materials transported to your plants? What distance? What is your energy source? That's usually the easiest way. Everybody has their electricity and natural gas bills and propane bills and so on. That's easy to get. But now where are your products being transported on average, and what is the installation methods? What are waste streams associated with production and installation? All those need to be considered. That's why it takes so long for the process to take. I haven't seen a project for EPD that took less than a year to realize. It could happen. We've seen some that work really close, but it is not something that comes overnight. It really is a process that can be... Well now, because there's more and more experts out there, companies may hire an expert and manufacturers can have their life cycle assessment done and then verified by a third party afterwards. There's all kinds of ways to do that, but it doesn't mean that it will go so much faster because it's a process that has somewhat a good level of complexity that's embedded in.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. Okay, good, good, good answer. We have two questions that are very similar, one from Bill Almond, one from Connie Howe, both asking, "Can you speak to the acceptance of worst case versus industry average with respect to adhesives, a small part of the building envelope?"

Jean-François Côté: Typically, if we're talking about EPDs, worst cases are, I wouldn't say they don't stand out. We don't see that. What we see is, especially in the case of an industry average EPD, you see the average product. The process by which the EPDs are developed is to inform the users of what is the average impact of either a product category or a product family. If you look for a specific manufacturer, it would be an average on a year. Everything is based on a one year of production.

`If you compare multiple EPDs, and maybe that's the angle of the question, if you compare multiple EPDs and you have a best performer and a worst performer, sometimes the differences may be really, really small because you may think that the location or the transportation and the distances really make up for a large impact on the results. At the end of the day, for our industry, the impact of the selection of raw materials, the identity, the nature of the substances used in the products that accounts for, let's say more than 70% of the environmental impacts in general. So if you're manufacturing a product and a competitor is manufacturing a product that competes with yours, chances are that if they're made of somewhat of the same basic substances to begin with, the impacts, the difference in impacts are going to be really, really small. We also need to recognize that within a certain product category, the differences, even though we may be talking about percentages, they still are within a reasonably small amount of differences between products.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. And then follow up question. For global companies, what's the difference between U.S. and EU PCR use?

Jean-François Côté: And we're right there because Soprema, if you guys didn't know, is a French company. Our global headquarters are in France, so we live this on an ongoing basis. Rules in Europe are the same, but there are some specificities in the reporting. There are regimes of report for the environmental impacts that are a little bit different from Europe. We call it the CML. And in North America, which is called the TRACI, T-R-A-C-I and those... Well, if you look at some EPDs, you'll see that both are reported because global companies sometimes want to have their impacts accounted for in both regions or in some cases PCRs require the disclosure of both sets of results, but otherwise... And the differences are very slim.

Again, it's just most of the time it's because of the scenarios that need to be considered for end of life or use phase that will differ, that's going to create a little bit of difference in the results. But otherwise it's very consistent with one another, which is the intent of the whole idea of going under ISO standards to develop EPDs is that any product, regardless of where it is manufactured, is going to be evaluated somewhat of the same way. Of course, energy use is different in Europe or the sources of electricity is different, even in North America from one region to the other, you'll have big differences. It shows into the results because of the regionalities.

Amandine Tragus: You also have... We'll see building codes that will be different so the way you're going to look at. And in Europe also you have different regulations depending the country. That's also different compared to Northern America.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Okay. How are EPDs verified?

Jean-François Côté: It is a great question because anybody can claim whatever they want, but in order for a document to be labeled and said that it is an EPD, it has to have gone through a third party verification. There are experts out there that are experts in life cycle assessment that all they do is verify EPDs. And believe me, these people have a lot of work these days.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow.

Jean-François Côté: Sometimes, I hate to say that, but it can be the bottleneck of the time that it takes for EPDs to eventually get out of there. It's a very precious work and I've seen verification reports that these guys do an outstanding job, so it is worth it, but it means time. Again, make sure that if you are looking for EPDs to be developed for your company, take your time, be ahead of the time because it's a process.

Yeah, those people are third parties, so they're not, as a manufacturer, you don't even get to choose who will be the verifier for the EPDs that are being developed for you. Somebody, usually the program operator is going to assign a verifier to your program. The verifier is going to first review the life cycle assessment report, which contains the results of the data with all confidential information in it. That means that you have to have potentially a non-disclosure agreement with the verifier that you haven't chosen so it sometimes can create challenges. And then afterwards they also review and verify the EPDs themselves because the EPDs have less information, they are not meant to disclose confidential or proprietary information. They also review that to ensure that the rules have been followed and that all information that needed to be disclosed is actually disclosed.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. Okay. That's good. If it's a family recipe, it won't be completely leaked.

Jean-François Côté: Exactly. That's the spirit. Any document that goes out to the public is intended to be free of information that is so sensitive. In other words, you let the LCA consultant and or verifier the ability to verify everything. You are entirely exposing yourself as a company to those people. And those people are credible enough that when they say that they verified the EPD and the information that's in that document is adequate, we need to trust them. That's the basics of the exercise so that we don't have, as a manufacturer to go all the way and disclose everything because we want to keep secrets away from our competitors, for sure.

Megan Ellsworth: Right, right. What can these EPDs be used for?

Jean-François Côté: It's funny because in the beginning, you know what, EPDs were developed for us manufacturers, they were intended to allow us to understand the hotspots in our processes. Where would the environmental impacts be coming from the most? And we as manufacturers would use this information to work and reduce the impacts of what we could have a handle on and say, "Okay, can we work on this ingredient because it seems to be the one that causes the most grief or has the largest environmental impacts?" With that information in hand, we could have... Because when you don't know, you don't know, but once you've seen what you can work on, that was very informative and especially because like I said, most of the impacts are coming from raw materials for industries like ours.

It was evident... It was obvious that, okay, this is the way we should be going and trying to find recycled materials to replace fossil based products or bio-based composition. There's so much products out there coming in the marketplace that use bio-sourced, natural source products, so that has an impact. Working on those parameters is something that was used for, but I'm turning it to Amandine because that's where it was, but today it's a little bit different.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah.

Amandine Tragus: Yes, yes, that's totally right. Like Jean-Francois said, it started for the manufacturers, but today, of course, EPDs are also used to compare the environmental impacts of products. Every EPD includes a statement on comparability, but unfortunately comparisons are often done incorrectly. For example, Jean-Francois mentioned earlier that the PCR, product category rule is like a rule book that outlines the minimum requirements for creating an LCA. One of those requirements is which lifecycle stages need to be assessed.

You have today some companies that will stick to the basics why others will look at all the stages, so the four different stages that I mentioned earlier. If you try to compare the global warming potential, GWP of two products, let's say one where only the product stage was assessed and another where all stages were included, you just cannot compare them directly, this will be like comparing apples and oranges pretty much.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Okay. I know that there are quite a few contractors on here listening in. Why should they care about EPDs? I feel like we've understood why manufacturers should care, but why should contractors care?

Jean-François Côté: I think contractors are in a very specific spot in the chain of, I wouldn't say chain of command, but what I mean by this is that contractors will be at the forefront of requests from people who will want EPDs. They will typically be the first ones to hear, "Eh, by the way, if we're going any further with this, I'm going to need EPDs for this product or whatever." The most products that can be... The ones especially that this contractor is required or requested to be installing, and they could be in a tight spot depending on sometimes they chose the product, sometimes somebody chose the product for them and they just bid on a job and accepted to go with the flow and contractors will be caught in the middle depending on the product that was chosen. Is it covered by an EPD or not?

We often receive as manufacturers, we receive requests coming from contractors, but we know that the request has come to them from the other partners in the decision making process. I think the relationship between manufacturers and contractors is crucial here because if a project is showing like it's going to require or will benefit from having EPDs, well, contractors are informed of that and they probably know that, okay, if this is coming our way, we probably get our acts together to make sure that we're going to install products that are covered by an EPD with manufacturers that we know can supply the information readily and without any problem down the road.

Megan Ellsworth: Got it. Okay. Yeah, that answered my question beautifully. How do those EPDs play a role in the market, differentiating one manufacturer from another, from the eyes of a contractor?

Amandine Tragus: I think that today, it's what I mentioned earlier, the EPD is always [inaudible 00:44:35] to a customer's demand. I think that customer will want to know more and more information. It's very important to be transparent and you will be even more in the next decades. It's really, for me, again, if you're not able to provide that information at some point you'll begin to lose opportunities. And again, Jean-Francois explained very well and I think everybody understood that creating an EPD is not a quick process. It takes a year. Yes, that's my point of view.

Megan Ellsworth: And follow-up question from someone. From... What's their name? Follow-up question, how much does it cost for these EPDs to be created? Is there any investment on the manufacturer's side?

Jean-François Côté: Yes, it's a process that requires a lot of involvement. Yes, it is a costly process. The actual life cycle assessment process that is required to be done in order for an EPD to get created, if it is outsourced so if it is made by a third-party consultant, like most of the time today, that is a process that will cost, I would say significant amount of money. Depending on the size of the project, it can range, but I haven't seen any EPD project that costs less than $20,000 say. Most of the time industries get together and manufacturers through their associations. We've heard about ASC today as a participant to our Adhesive and Sealant Council. Let's take that as an example. Members of the Adhesives and Sealant Council could come together, develop an industry average EPD on behalf of the whole industry. By doing this, they share the cost of the work that is being done.

There are internal costs associated with extracting the data for a year's worth of manufacturing and all of the different inputs that need to be considered for EPDs. And there's a cost associated with paying a third-party consultant to do this. That cost can be replaced by internal costs if you hire people and you have a team that can do this in-house, so far not that many manufacturers or industries do that. We still are relying heavily on third-party consultants to do so, and there's plenty of very good consultants that, so really it's a question of how efficient you want to be and so on in order to do that. But from a cost standpoint, there's a cost there. The proponent of an EPD needs also to pay for the third party verification. That verification process also requires some amount of money to covering it. And depending on the program operator that has been chosen, every program operator has their own schedule for prices in terms of how many EPDs are being published, is there a maintenance fee, a yearly fee or whatever.

It's a process that can certainly go upwards. I've seen proposals that were above $100,000 for really complicated projects and so on, but really it's... And shop around. That's the message that I may bring here is that there are some lifecycle assessment experts that have done projects in the same product category as yours. They probably are a little bit more, they have experience in the type of project that you may want to bring them. It's worth looking at what have they done before, who have they been working with? They typically have, when they make a proposal, they will tell you on which EPD projects have they worked before. It helps, oh yeah, they did this project for this company or this group there. That sounds similar to ours. Maybe they have a little bit more experience with what they would be doing for us.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay.

Amandine Tragus: If I can just add something, is that Jean-Francois mentioned it earlier, but the LCA process can also be done in-house by of course, qualified individuals in request of the knowledge and experience, but that can also reduce the overall cost because then after you'll just need the third party to verify and approve your document.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Okay. We have lots of comments and questions coming in. First comments from John from IIBEC, he said, "I've heard the amount of 1 million bandied about for industry-wide EPDs. This answer has been informative." That's good. Wow, that's a lot of money. And then question from him is, "Playing devil's advocate, how can EPDs be misused in the planning and design process?"

Amandine Tragus: That's a good question. Thinking.

Jean-François Côté: Yes. Amandine, you brought something up about comparability earlier. I think that's probably one of the biggest misuses.

Amandine Tragus: Yes, I totally agree. I think to use an EPD, you cannot just take the document and read the data and start comparing. You must be knowledgeable, at least a minimum of when it comes to EPDs, you have to be very careful because otherwise you can quickly start comparing data that are not coming from... Like I said, comparing apples with oranges.

Jean-François Côté: And I think one of the other misuses that I can think of is an industry average for a product category being referenced by a manufacturer that has not been part of the development of that EPD. Nobody's forced to work on an industry average EPD. There are times that an association, a trade association, is going to establish a program for development of an industry average EPD. And for any given reason, one member of that association who is a manufacturer of the product that's under consideration may choose not to be part of it.

That's totally fine in that case, the EPD will disclose that information by the absence of the name of that manufacturer in the EPD, but that manufacturer cannot use that document afterwards if they chose not to do the industry-wide. Maybe that's because they just say, "Ah, I'm going to go by myself and spend the money on a product specific EPD." That could be the reason why.

Other than that, I think that there are subtle things into EPDs that, like Amandine said, need to be understood. What is the functional unit? Functional unit being say in the case of a roofing membrane for roof and waterproofing, one meter squared or one square foot of roofing covered by this product is going to create those environmental impacts. You need to understand what the functional unit is, and also what is the reference service life if relevant to the EPD. That means if the EPD is covering the whole life cycle from cradle to grave, then there's a use phase in the middle. That use phase has to be disclosed. How long is the use phase? How long does the product last? Does it need to be replaced? At what schedule? Those types of things. We're down to really details into the use of EPDs, but sometimes this is where there could be some discrepancy or misunderstanding, maybe not misuse, but misunderstanding of the information contained in EPDs.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay.

Amandine Tragus: Yes.

Megan Ellsworth: Okay. There's a little bit of gray area there. John said, "Thank you, Megan, Amandine, JF, very well done." Oh, thanks, John.

Jean-François Côté: Thank you, John.

Amandine Tragus: Thanks.

Megan Ellsworth: Bill Almond also said, "Thanks, JF. ASC is indeed working toward developing an industry-wide EPD for a few product categories with a group of our members. That's awesome.

Jean-François Côté: Nice. Yep.

Megan Ellsworth: That's awesome. Okay, so I think this will be our last question because this hour has totally flown by. Thank you everyone for all your comments and questions and being here. This has been great. A quick reminder, this will be up on RoofersCoffeeShop within 24 to 48 hours so you can share it out with all your co-workers, friends, family members, your cousin and share this great information out. Lastly, is it possible for a contractor to use EPDs proactively rather than waiting for the customer to ask for it? Can they choose their offering based on EPDs to promote a low-impact install to generate leads?

Jean-François Côté: Yes, absolutely. And that is something that we see sometimes, but those customers, we want them. We want to have those customers that are interested in using that information proactively because it can be a value. You never know whether a client is receptive or not to the contents of an EPD, to the claims on environmental impacts of products. You could be, talking to deaf ears, but at the end of the spectrum, you could be really into a very positive environment by providing that information to a potential client. And again, like Amandine said, for us manufacturers, having EPDs and showing transparency helps us standing out. It can be the same for contractors as well, I believe, if they choose to promote directly or indirectly products that are covered by EPDs.

Amandine Tragus: Yes, and I think that being proactive is very important. For me this is how you will build trust long-term.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, absolutely. Well, wow, this has been a great conversation. I'm going to share my screen again just to thank Soprema for bringing this really great topic to our attention and just being a great partner. Brenda just said, "Trust marketing." If you are a contractor out there watching this and are thinking, how can I use these EPDs? There you go, right there. Proactively. Thank you Soprema so, so much for sponsoring this and thank you Jean-Francois and Amandine for chatting with me today.

Jean-François Côté: Thank you, Megan. Thank you, RoofersCoffeeShop. It was really, really interesting. I really enjoyed my morning.

Megan Ellsworth: Yay.

Amandine Tragus: Yes, thank you very much.

Outro: Yay. I'm so glad. Just so everyone knows, next week we will be at IRE and we'll be talking with day one a group of contractors with the same questions, a little bit changed, that we've been asking since 2020. We get to kind of see the evolution of these interview question and answers from contractors since we've been doing Coffee Conversations live in person. That's day one on Wednesday the 19th. And then we'll have another one with service providers, distributor, manufacturer, service provider technology representatives from the industry on day two on the 20th. We hope to see you all there at IRE. Come by our booth in the lobby to say hi and get some swag. This has been great. Thank you all so much. This will be up on RoofersCoffeeShop within 24 to 48 hours. Go check it out and we'll see you next time on the next Coffee Conversation.