EPDs slowly gaining acceptance for road work, but challenges remain By Russell W. Snyder, CAE
G
reen may be the most popular color in the color wheel these days, but moving environmental-awareness and sustainability beyond a marketing slogan to a robust and trusted system for procurement is proving to be a daunting challenge, even for a green-centric state like California. Take EPDs, for example. Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) appeared to be a logical first step for project owners to better understand the environmental impacts of the construction materials used in a project. But raising awareness about EPDs has been a challenge from Day 1. So has agreeing on what should go into an EPD, and ensuring that the information is accurate and comparable. Adding to the challenges, gathering and quantifying the data needed to produce the underlying environmental Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) and Product Category Rules (PCR) is an excruciatingly slow and timeconsuming (expensive) process, which has further slowed the ability of the EPD concept to catch on. Still, the forward progress is unmistakable. “It is coming whether you like it or not,” says Greg Reader, an engineer with CalAPA associate member LASTRADA Partners who was the point person for developing EPDs when he was a Technical Specialist for CalAPA member George Reed Inc. “Get 12
in front of this. It’s an opportunity to be a leader in our industry and shape the future. That’s my best advice. Confront this with your eyes wide open.” Indeed, the steady drumbeat from project owners to better understand the environmental impacts of the projects they design and build and the materials they use continues unabated. Local agencies in particular increasingly call for EPDs on projects, triggering a frenetic conversation on the state of the science and the practicality and feasibility of generating them. At the same time, a cottage industry has developed to generate EPDs that may not meet stringent international standards for quality and transparency, further muddling the EPD picture. “It is a recipe for chaos and bad decisions and cheating if done wrong,” says John Harvey, Ph.D., P.E., Director of the University of California Pavement Research Center. He urged a step-wise approach whereby agencies request EPDs, evaluate them and set regional baselines based on the information they gather from the first one to two years of EPDs. Some EPDs currently contain national baselines, Harvey said, which may or may not be accurate and relevant to what is achievable locally. “What we are concerned about,” he said, “is local agencies that are moving straight to procurement and looking to accept quasi-EPDs
with non-transparent data, and ‘go / no-go’ specifications that have baselines that may produce no incentive to improve if they are set too low or be very difficult to achieve even with significant innovation if set too high.” Long term, many familiar with the EPD concept see California public agencies continuing to ask for EPDs, and eventually require them for projects. Ultimately, these people say, project owners may establish those baselines for projects from data gleaned from EPDs, and use that to determine winning bidders in a low-bid environment, which is most worrisome to the industry given the nascent state of EPD science and application. That concern was shared by the UCPRC’s Harvey. “The idea is to collect information, using real EPDs, based on real operations, that undergo a critical review and are transparent,” Harvey said. “A goal could be to go to an incentive-disincentive model, rather than disqualifying potential bidders in a go/no-go system and possibly driving up prices. With an incentive-disincentive model, if you are good, you are rewarded. If you are not good, there is a disincentive. And as the overall industry and local competitors continue to innovate as reflected in incoming EPDs, the baseline for incentives and disincentives continues to be adjusted to drive innovation.”
California Asphalt Magazine • 2020 Environmental Issue
