Lehigh Hanson, Inc., Irving, Texas; CP staff
Lehigh Cement has published the industry’s first Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) utilizing the new North American Product Category Rule (PCR) for Portland, Blended, Masonry, Mortar, and Stucco Cements. The latter document enables Lehigh and fellow Portland Cement Association and Cement Association of Canada members to tailor EPD to sustainability and green building practitioners’ increasingly robust transparency standards.
The declarations were prepared by California-based programmer Climate Earth, whose software has supported ready mixed and manufactured concrete EPD. The Lehigh declaration references ASTM C 150 Types IL, I/II, III and companion CSA A3001 Types GUL, GU, HE cements from the Delta (B.C.) Cement Plant and Terminal and Bellingham (Wash.) Cement Grinding Plant and Terminal. Per Cement PCR 2.0 guidelines, the EPD reference Global Warming Potential (GWP)—a carbon dioxide emissions indicator—and related environmental impacts of Delta and Bellingham production and finishing processes. Lehigh Cement cites the positive GWP metrics of Types IL/GUL portland-limestone versus the Types I/II and GU/HE, topped by a 10 percent CO2 reduction in concrete. Under the EcoCem PLC brand, the producer has promoted the Type IL/GUL cement for nearly a decade, primarily in the Pacific Northwest and Ontario.
“We have made it one of our top priorities to benchmark and lower our CO2 emissions with ambitious targets,” says Lehigh Hanson Canada Region Vice President of Sales & Logistics Shawn McMillan. “Our plant and product-specific EPDs communicate the environmental impact through GWP for cement in a simple and easy-to-understand manner. We intend to use the added product transparency to more effectively gain adoption for our lower carbon products. We have several research projects and studies ongoing to continue to optimize the carbon impacts from cement and concrete.”
The National Ready Mixed Concrete Association is hosting the Delta and Bellingham declarations, posted here and here, as an EPD Program Operator. ASTM International functioned in that same capacity for the initial Cement PCR, issued in 2014. That Rule abided (International Organization for Standardization’s) ISO 14025:2006, “Environmental labels and declarations — Type III environmental declarations — principles and procedures.” Its successor was developed according to ISO 21930:2017, “Sustainability in buildings and civil engineering works – Core rules for environmental product declarations of construction products and services,” and published by NSF International, National Center for Sustainability Standards. Ann Arbor, Mich.-based NSF is also Program Operator for Cement PCR 2.0, posted here.