Driving Sustainability Through Transparency: The Polyiso EPD Journey

This course discusses Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) as a standardized approach for reporting a product’s environmental impacts across its full life cycle. Within a “cradle-to-grave” system boundary, all life cycle stages are evaluated, including the extraction and processing of raw materials, product manufacture, installation, service life, disposal, and transport attributed to each module. Participants will learn how EPDs summarize the environmental footprint of polyiso insulation products using scientific and quantitative life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology governed by consensus standards (i.e., ISO 14025, ISO 14040/14044, and ISO 21930) and Product Category Rule (PCR) frameworks. This comprehensive rule set enables the analysis and reporting of results using consistent and comparable methods for a given product category (i.e., thermal insulation in building envelope applications). Additionally, the course examines the environmental impacts of polyiso roof insulation, wall insulation, and polyiso high-density roof cover board products. It focuses on identifying key metrics such as global warming potential (GWP) and places the results of the analysis in the context of other insulation material types. The analysis also identifies environmental impact hotspots associated with key environmental indicators and discusses potential reduction measures.

Upon completion of this course, the Learner should be able to:

• Explain how the framework for developing EPDs helps ensure technical accuracy and functional comparability.
• Assess and explain the impact of recent updates to the Product Category Rule for “Building Envelope Thermal Insulation EPD Requirements” on environmental impact results for polyiso roof and wall insulation.
• Understand and analyze the effect of system boundary life cycle stages on the environmental impact categories for polyiso insulation and polyiso roof cover boards.
• Calculate environmental impacts of polyiso insulation products at different R-value other than the functional unit.
• Identify how EPDs for different types of building insulation can be incorporated into material selection, building design and whole building life cycle assessments.

Approximately 1 hour. Delivered via webinar or face-to-face presentation. Available sessions shown below.

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This course is registered with: 2 Industry Association(s)