Command Alkon and Climate Earth economize Environmental Product Declarations

Sources: Climate Earth, Berkeley, Calif.; CP staff

Document solutions from Climate Earth allow users with COMMANDseries from Command Alkon to place an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), an internationally accepted eco-label, directly into every bid submittal. Linking Command Alkon production software with Climate Earth environmental data streamlines document completion and positions ready mixed suppliers to be among the first in the green-building industry to deliver EPDs for every material order or product on any project they bid.

Climate Earth announced this capability November 12 at the 2014 Command Alkon Customer Training and Technology Conference in New Orleans. It dovetails ready mixed producers’ preparation for green building projects requiring or incentivizing EPD submittal. Such jobs include those where owners or architects target certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s new LEED v4 rating system, whose Materials & Resources section outlines point potential for environmental declaration-backed specifications.

“Climate Earth allows our customers to dramatically reduce costs of producing EPDs and provides a near effortless path to make [the documents] part of every bid and thus an integral part of normal business operations,” affirms Command Alkon Global Software Services Manager George Hadgraf.

“Our strategic focus is to lower the cost of EPDs and help make the growing demand for product transparency easy for customers to address. Working with Command Alkon is a big step forward in achieving these two objectives,” adds Climate Earth CEO Chris Erickson. “Ready mixed producers are poised to systematically consider a product’s environmental impact alongside other traditional performance metrics, such as cost and quality.” Inclusion of impact data within core business operation software, he adds, is a natural progression in a green-building industry increasingly focused on measuring and managing at a whole project footprint level.

Combining database technology with internationally accepted life cycle assessment methods, Climate Earth developed EPDs for two California front-runners, San Jose-based Central Concrete Supply and San Francisco Bay Area neighbor Cemex USA, published in November 2013 and June 2014, respectively. Both documents are based on the Product Category Rule for Concrete developed under the University of Washington College of Built Environment-hosted Carbon Leadership Forum, of which Climate Earth and Central Concrete Supply are members.