2023 Carbon Leadership Forum North American Material Baselines

Brook Waldman, Allison Hyatt, Stephanie Carlisle, Jordan Palmeri, Kathrina Simonen,
2023

The purpose of the CLF North American Material Baselines Report is to provide a snapshot of the state of EPDs. This report includes:
• Background methodology: this report narrative;
• CLF Baselines: industry-average embodied carbon values against which product level comparisons can be made; and
• Appendices: detailed Appendix for each product category that includes a description of the embodied carbon impacts, the available EPDs, and summary statistics.
The CLF Baselines represent an estimate of industry-average GHG emissions for construction materials manufactured in North America. Globally, the availability of embodied carbon data for materials and products is growing as more and more manufacturers make the environmental impacts of their supply chains known by publishing EPDs. Still, the publication of EPDs and other carbon disclosure is voluntary and its adoption has been uneven. While not all products or manufacturers are currently
represented in public databases such as EC3, the number of available EPDs has grown over the last few years. Due to the dynamic nature of these datasets, evolving Product Category Rules (PCRs), and the additional uncertainty factors being placed on EPD
results in the EC3 tool, users have identified the need for a static baseline against which product-level comparisons can be made and measurable targets can be established.
This report issues a snapshot of all available North American EPDs, providing a fixed reference point for comparisons of A1-A3 (cradle-to-gate) embodied carbon impacts for building materials.
The snapshot of available EPDs summarized in each Appendix was assembled using the EC3 database in Fall 2022. This report uses the term “product EPD” to refer to any EPD that represents products from a single manufacturer, as opposed to an industry-wide EPD that represents products from many manufacturers.

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