Um hi everyone um so thanks for coming uh to the webinar just a couple of little things before we get started um so you may notice that there’s a slightly different client here with us today than what was advertised um due to unforeseen circumstances jrl group had to pull out
So instead we’re very very excited to have hydrotech here instead so we’ve got Pina from hydrotech who will be doing the kind of case study part of the webinar um um another thing is just the the Q&A so we’re going to do a Q&A at the end of
The session so if you have any questions throughout just pop them in the Q&A box and then we’ll go back and read them at the end um and the only other thing is there’s a couple of polls that we’re going to be putting up if you’ve been to
A webinar with a poll before they’ll just pop up on the screen when I when I tell you um and then you’ll just click the answer that you want and then the Box will disappear um and we can share some of the the results of the poll later
So with that um I’ll just do a couple of quick introductions so I’m Verity morouse and I’m a business developer for uh one click LCA and I focus on our uh product LCA and epd side of the business um and then Pina do you want to do a
Quick introduction to yourself as well yeah so I’m Pina Lani I’m Minister sorry an administrative assistant at hydrotech and I’m also a second year law student at the University of Southampton perfect so before we get started we’re going to do a quick poll um we just want
To know where everyone is at in their own epd Journey um you might just be here to learn um and so they’re not applicable um but otherwise let us know if you’ve created them before if you’re just trying to learn about them or if you’re already an epd
Expert just give you a couple of seconds to click the the option that most applies you on the screen okay um and then a quick introduction as well to one click LCA for any of you who don’t know who we are already um we are a life cycle
Assessment software provider um so that is both for buildings life cycle assessment and uh product life cycle assessments um so calculating the carbon footprint either of an entire building project or of a particular product um our headquarters are BAS in Helsinki and Finland um but we’ve got staff spread
All over the world um the software is used in about 140 countries worldwide at the moment um we’re not just a software provider we’re also a training provider so I don’t know if any of you have been to our boot camps um we’ve run them a few times a year and they’re they’re
Quite in-depth free training on life cycle assessment and but also with every software license we sell we provide training so you know what you’re doing in terms of the the actual kind of life cycle assessment methodology but also the functionality of the software as well um pretty much work across the whole
Industry we work with Engineers Architects manufacturers Builders investors Etc just depends on which software is most applicable to them um and also what their kind of end goals are so we’re going to get started with just what an epd is so an epd is an environmental products declaration uh
Which is essentially an externally verified and standardized description of the environmental profile of a product or material over its lifetime um so effectively it’s a carbon footprint certificate to say this is the environmental impact of my product um they’re what’s known as type three environmental labels based on standards
Um we’ll go into a bit more detail on those standards in a bit but that gives you a good overview in terms of why they’re important um so just a few statistics on uh I guess the the global uh crisis so buildings are responsible for about 39%
Of global carbon emissions about 28% of those come from operational emissions from buildings and then 11% of M come from the materials and construction so the actual embodied carbon so in terms of uh I guess the scale of that so cities are growing pretty rapidly um they they’re set to
Grow by about 230 billion meters squared by 2060 and that’s generating about 100 to 200 gigatons of embodied carbon so that’s not just from new construction but it’s also from renovation and infrastructure as well which is the equivalent to building a New York City every day for 34 days
Until 20 every every 34 days until 2060 so it’s pretty significant in terms of environmental impacts in terms of what we’re doing about it so there’s already a number of initiatives regulations um and guidance released um to help us meet our Targets in terms of carbon reduction um so for
Example there’s the London plan um So within the London plan you have to report on uh you have to do a building LCA for every May referable scheme um within London so that doesn’t mean that you have to have epds but ideally epds are the most reliable data that’s used within those building
Lcas um also in bringing body carbon UPF front which is the coordinated action plan for the building and construction sectors to tackle EMB body carbon the world Green Building C Council issued a bold Vision that all construction should be operationally neutral and create at least 40% less in body carbon by 2030
And then by 2050 new buildings infrastructure and Renovations should have uh Net Zero in body carbon um and then all buildings including existing buildings and new buildings should be Net Zero in terms of operational carbon as well so just to be clear what the differences are between embodied carbon
Operational carbon and then also whole life carbon um so EMB body carbon is effectively all the emissions released right from the raw material extraction until you cut the ribbon on that building and it’s ready to start being used so that’s everything as I mentioned from the raw materials transportation transporting those materials actually
Manufacturing all of the individual components of that building and then constructing that building as well um it does also include the demolition uh of the building at the end of life and also any retrofitting or kind of Maintenance as well throughout the building operational carbon then is all
The the emissions produced from actually using that building so heating it using lighting ventilation Cooling and just general power use um so if you add in body carbon and operational carbon together you get whole life carbon and why do we kind of harop on about embod carbon so much um it’s
Because like historically I guess we’ve always put a bit more of an emphasis on the actual operational carbon so there’s a lot of renewable energy and solar and things like that um but over time our grids are decarbonizing and therefore the embodied carbon is becoming a lot
More of a significant factor um so you can see in this chart here this initial um kind of Peak at the very start of the the building’s lifetime is what we refer to as the kind of carbon Bur bur so this is all the carbon released before the
Building’s even used and then over time you can see the operational energy year on year and over time that is going to reduce you can also see there’s a few little pink Parts here and this is for replacement parts uh for the building so as Peter jaer famously said
You can’t manage what you don’t measure which is why epds come into play um they’re obviously a very reliable uh carb building block for a building uh for a building life cycle assessment um so it can help us manage and measure The Upfront carbon in our our
Construction in terms of what a life cycle assessment actually is as well this diagram is quite a nice one for just highlighting all of the different stages um so it’s a standardized methodology um it’s broken down into life cycle stages which are numbered as A1 to A3 which is your raw material
Extraction transportation to a manufacturing site and then also the actual manufacturing energy then you’ve got stages A4 to A5 which are your construction stages so transporting to a construction site and then uh installing the the products and then the use stage so any use maintenance repair replacement parts over the lifetime of
The product or building and then the C1 to C4 is the end of life stage so deconstructing uh and then waste processing as well so in terms of the methodology so life cycle assessments are a structured and standardized methodology um associated with uh measuring the impacts
Of all the life cycle stage of the building they are a quantitative analysis so they’re based on numbers um you can have life cycle assessments for buildings and then you can have life cycle assessments for products as well and then life cycle assessments for products you can go a step further and
Create an epd so you can get it verified and published in line with the the standards so we often like to uh think of epd data and the data that goes into it a bit like a cake um because we like cake and we like to refer everything
Back to it um so if you were to create a cake uh you would need a list of ingredients that go into that and then all of those ingredients would have calories associated with them and then you would also have electricity and water to actually mix and cook that cake
As well once you’ve got the cake uh made you’d be able to know exactly how many calories are in the entire cake because you’ve got all of those uh calories associated with the ingredients and therefore you can know exactly how much damage it’s going to do to you if you
Were to eat it all um similarly for buildings or for materials um if if you were to uh create a building instead of having a list of ingredients you would have a uh list of materials or bill of materials each of those materials if they had an epd would have a carbon
Number associated with them um if you then add them all up and obviously apply the energy and water to actually create that create that building you would be able to then know the exact carbon impact of the entire building itself in terms of embodied carbon if you didn’t have a carbon
Equivalent associated with each of the materials there’s no way of you knowing how much impact that entire building has had again when you actually look at an epd um this is an example of an epd results table on the right hand side so we like to refer those back to food as
Well so it’s a little bit like a nutrition label but with uh reference to environmental impacts rather than um actual ingredients or um calorics so on a nutrition label you’ve got your serving information your serving size in an epd this would effectively be your declared unit so for
Example if it was flooring you would use a declared unit of a met squared um if it was maybe uh concrete you might use meters cubed or you could use kilogram so it’s whatever the most suitable unit of measure is for that particular product then you’ve got your calories so
In a in an epd this is effectively your total uh CO2 equivalent so that’s the number that most people refer to is your total CO2 equivalent for your A1 to A3 phases um and then here you’ve got all of your um nutrients so in an epd this would refer to other environmental
Impacts so they don’t just look at global warming potential or CO2 equivalent they also look look at other things like ozone depletion acidification etc etc so that’s pretty much it on the introduction I’m going to hand over to Pina now who’s going to talk about um her experience creating epds uh using
The one click LCA epd generator software um and the the process of that basically so I’ll hand over to you Pina thank you ver so just as a small introduction hydr is a German industrial water treatment company that has been operating in the UK for over 30 years now we provide
Equipment for scale control bacterial control and water filtration and also work on bespoke projects and offer maintenance contracts regardless of how large the property is we have equipment all over the UK and also sell internationally both for large companies large buildings and smaller buildings and individual
Homes so there are a few reasons why we have started to use epds uh the first being for research knowing the environmental footprint is encouraging us to become more carbon neutral and make our products more environmentally friendly leading the way in our Market the second reason is transparency our
Customers are increasingly asking about the environmental impact and we want to be UPF front about it it also helps companies with their non-financial reporting which is especially important for listed companies and audits so we initially started with the subm 65s but they can be manipulated so they aren’t really as trustworthy we
Didn’t take into account the use stage with TM 65s and found it easier to consider all variables with epds through one click epds also calculate the impact of the manufacturing processes not just the materials used so the full life cycle is considered meaning they’re more accurate and detailed getting our epds verified and
Competing crad to grave epds means there’s more accountability and accuracy in our reporting and as a result our customers find us more reliable and we can also know whether we’ve made any mistakes along the way um and last but not least in the epd there are sections where you’re able to
Explain exactly what was considered and the processes undergone to Cate the products environmental impact and also any emissions when doing so so it just adds a bit more context to the data data shown the customer isn’t just then looking at numbers they’re understanding the whole life cycle and the whole story of the
Product so when creating epds in house there are a few reasons that you could do it the first being it is cheaper um it can have a lot it can cost a lot more to create them externally the second is that this is a bit more personal to us but hydr Tech’s
Products can be a bit difficult to explain to others so it just made sense for hydr to keep it inhouse where there’s no need to train someone else on our products and even if this training would be minimal it’s just easier to keep it in house really by keeping the process inhouse
Updates are also easier to complete as on new epds this also goes back to training new people by using an internal team it’s easier to train others on the creation of epds and the training can be kept more specific to the products and processes your company use so this is
What we’re doing at hydrotech I’m going to be training other members of the company on how to create epds and I’m actually creating a list of everything that is relevant for our products so all the raw materials all the processes that are for them things like that and this
Actually helps to streamline the process in the future as well because whoever is making the epd won’t have to go looking for the relevant materials and and processes personally I also think it’s easier to keep track of progress if the task is completed in house and time
Frames can be more realistic as a result if you know how long it’s taking you to complete an epd you can adjust your expectations for the future so in terms of how we use epds creating epds is essentially is essentially step one to the process of becoming more environmentally friendly
By creating creating epds we making life easier for our customers through providing information that they need for end unit end users and it’s critical for our consultant for Consultants to win business too sorry making upds forces us to continuously update the data on our products and forces us to look at each
Individual part of the life cycles I think the best part about creating upds is that it shows you the impact of every part of your products like how it impacts the environment so we’re using this knowledge to better understand where our product life cycles can be changed to lessen our
Environmental impact and overall epds are allowing us to create a more sustainable future so I’m now going to walk through the actual process of creating an epd and some of the challenges that we Face throughout including the data collection onboarding course template completing a full range verification and publication
And completing additional ranges with a bit of averaging in there as well so starting with data collection you’ve already see in this diagram but just to explain a little bit more about what goes into it um this is actually the most important part of the process
But it can be a bit timec consuming uh it’s better to have too much data than not enough though so spend your time on this really make sure that you’re getting everything you can we collected this data over the course of about a year and there are various modules that
Must be covered in it so there’s the A1 to A3 product stage which is about the raw materials the processes used on the the transport of the materials and the raw materials and transport of the packaging as well A4 to A5 is the construction stage and is about the transportation and
Installation of the product including the disposal of the packaging we had limited data for this and use an approximate distance from our manufacturers to London because our manufacturers are in Germany um we sell our equipment across the whole of the UK so we could really use a more specific
Distance but if you can it is better to B1 to B5 the use stage is not always covered in the epds but we chose to include it to the best of our ability we included the energy and water use for our products as this has had a significant impact on our carbon
Emissions but this can be tailored to whatever your product or building is and finally there are module C and D about the end of life stage and the benefits and loads of the end of life which I don’t believe module D is shown on the diagram but it is important to
Bear in mind with the section we had to make some assumptions based on UK data because we’re not p ly involved in the disposal of any products and many of us haven’t been disposed of um our head of Business Development and sustainabil sustainability recently found one of the
Very first Hydro mags ever sold about 30 years ago which was very interesting to see um module D that was probably the hardest to get my head around but this is where the template and the onboarding course really helped I’ll talk about those in a bit more detail but for now
Um I’ll just say I’ll just say that we had wood chippings and incin ation as part of rpds um so calculating the recover recoverable energy from this was quite difficult to understand and um learn in general but the template showed exactly how to do this and our Mentor or teacher
Mentor whatever want to call it explained why we did these calculations as well so after collecting all the data we did the onboarding course and I can honestly say it’s fantastic so the course included online lessons um throughout which you complete a full epd for one product and we had meetings
After every lesson to go through the work and to go through the work and create correct mistakes as required and I’m so grateful to one click for the help throughout this we opted for the 10e course at hch um as we wish to complete at least one full range as fast
As possible so when I say range I mean range of our products in our business um I actually managed to complete the course in about 3 weeks and publish a full range after a month uh which is certainly a task but that was from start to finish from the beginning of the
Onboarding course to publication the 10we course meant that I believe it would have meant that we would have completed one lesson and one meeting per week um obviously completing it in three weeks didn’t quite go like that we had a couple meetings a week and I would do I
Think one or two lessons at a time depending on um what the lessons were from this we actually also have additional support hours and we continued to use them throughout when publishing other upds and uh we’ll be continuing to use them in the future as well so moving on to the template the
Template was really helpful for us as we believe we are the first or at least one of the first industrial water treatment companies to create epds and it helped me know if I was on the right track when making RS um some of the modules was actually really necessary because of the
Calculations that we had to do like for the wood pallets and incineration like I mentioned earlier we provided information for our most complicated product for the template because ours had to get made specifically um and they laid out exactly how it should look including the comments and energy balancing which was incredibly
Helpful so there are some existing templates already but we did have to get ours specially made as there was not a template similar enough to our products um and one clct completed this within about two weeks which is I leave is a record for them so we have covered the data
Collection and onboarding course so let’s talk about completing an epd and a full range of products we did full one full range to start with which included eight products in our high mag range I’ve got a few photos on the screen these are CAD drawings but it can give you an idea of
What it looks like um the one at the end here is impossible to bring it’s about 600 keys so we can’t really show that in person but um the reason we did this is we wanted to publish them all at the same time and it’s a stable r as it’s a
Stable range for us the onboarding course is only one product but depending on how similar your products are this should be sufficient or at least it was for us uh I used what I learned in the course to complete the other products in the range and our other ranges one of
The products the one at the end um the heavy one is the DN 100 um and it was a little bit different to the others uh only it was only a couple materials and processes I think it was um a crate and aluminium instead of a wooden pallet and
Of plastic and uh so we did have to change those bits but our teacher was incredibly helpful using and we used our additional support hours for this we submitted all products in this region one go and it actually worked out slightly cheaper to do this as well and
The verification process was also a bit quicker Curr and easier as a result so the final stage we published with epd Hub and did so through the OCA website which is a helpful part of the software you can submit an epd straight from the software to epd HUB to get to
Get it verified we check the epd with our Mentor before submitting it to see if there were any mistakes in our data M balance or descriptions and the actual verification is a simple enough process we did did have to make some changes but they were painless so for example changing the
Data point for electricity or adding additional additional explanation in some of the comments I actually had to explain that we didn’t have water use for some of our products because they treat water not use it which was a bit funny but it gives you an idea of the kind of
Comments that we’ll expect to see they might just want to understand what the product is um yeah and overall the process was quite simple and it became a lot easier as I kept doing it part of this is because I made fewer mistakes but it becomes quicker in general
Too so the other ranges that we’ have completed were easy enough to do as well following the process that I had already learned and making changes to certain data points and details as required learning from the comments from the verifier but averaging was a little bit different so there were two ranges that
We had to complete this for and I hadn’t done this for our first range um and I had to look back at the onboarding course but it’s good that they keep that there you can still refer back to it as time goes on um so I looked back at the
Onboarding course to understand averaging and calculated the percentage averages based on the product’s relative weights there are a few ways of doing this this is how we personally chose to so if there’s uh one product that weighs 60 kg and another that weighs 40 it
Would be a 604 split if those were the only two in the average sorry I was talking as making my throat dry um and it also helped to have the expert licensed to complete the average in so it was at least the raw materials that
It worked for but it shows you you can create two designs and then average those and it gives you an idea of what it should look like and it can even calculate the percentages for you so overall we have completed 29 ebds covering four ranges and one Standalone
Product over the course of two months we will be using the results in the long term to discover how best to reduce our impact on the environment and how to become more carbon neutral we’re also planning to do this for four additional products so sorry um we planning to do
This for four additional products in the short term and we’re going to continue using the OC the one click software when doing so and finally I hope this has helped you understand the process a bit more and why epds are so useful thanks Brina that was yeah that
Was really good um building on on what pina’s uh gone through I’m also just going to go into a little bit more detail on some of the the rules that you have to follow she’s mentioned some of them like the averaging um but just to
Go into that a bit more um all epds are governed by what’s called a a program operator um so they they basically ensure that they are done in line with the standards um and that they’re they’re verified as well and they’re also responsible for hosting a public
Library of all published epds um so there’s probably 50 plus program operators out there um that could be for example epd Hub who we work particularly closely with um or it could be the International epd System and there are lot lots of others as well um so there’s
Two key documents that program operators um create um so one is the general program instructions um so they’re the basis of the overall Administration and the operation of the program such as the process for product category rules um and epd development and then verification the content and then the
Format of the epd as well um and then also product category rules so they can create specific rules for groups of products um which basically ensure you’re comparing apples with apples um so if going back to the flooring example if one manufacturer uses a declared unit
Of meters squared and the other one uses a declared unit of kilograms then when you’re comparing them it becomes very hard to know which one is greener um so product category rules outline a lot of of things um but one of them is is a declared unit there aren’t product
Category rules for every single product out there uh by any means um these can be developed um so if they don’t exist then you would refer back to the i50 na4 standard for epds for Construction Products um and there would be no kind of complementary rules to
That go on to the next one so in terms of the standards as well so epds do follow a number of Standards including the iso 14025 40 and 44 and then the en 15804 uh for Construction Products um and then the AL ISO 21930 as well um they’re also they they’re verified in
Accordance with the iso 14025 um they’re life cycle based um pretty much the whole of the world follows the 1584 standard the only exceptions to that are the US France and Holland they follow slightly different rules we have all of the results in the software for for them
Um but it’s just worth considering if you do have large client base based in the US France or Holland you’d probably have to publish a separate epd to satisfy them um another thing I wanted to go into a little bit more detail on um was
Types of epds um so for example you can just have a third-party uh epd uh well a parent epd this is basically this is just your standard uh epd for a single product um you need at least one year’s worth of production data to produce these
You can then have a sister epd so a sister epd is like a variation of an already published parent so say you had five products that were really similar you didn’t want to average them into one product or maybe they weren’t suitable for averaging but instead you wanted to
Make sure they were still linked um then you could produce a sister epd um they are a little bit cheaper to publish as well than just a a third party verified um and it’s worth saying they can’t vary more than plus minus 50% in terms of their global warming potential
Compared to the parent epd they have to have the same manufacturer same end use and about 80% the same materials as well then there’s what’s called a design phase epd so if you have not been producing a product for a year and so you don’t have a Year’s worth of
Production data then you can produce a design design phase epd they only lasts for 18 months rather than the five years that a normal epd would last um but you only you don’t need more than a month’s worth of production data to produce them so great for new products and then in a
Year or 18 months time you can get them reverified with your full years worth of data to turn them into a full epd and then a project epd um generally you would produce these for a specific project or or client if they have quite a bespoke assembly um so they only last
For 36 months obviously you don’t want to be doing this on every single projects that you uh kind of sell your products to or every single client because it can become quite timec consuming quite expensive um but they they do have their place so if you are providing something that’s really
Bespoke for a client and they they particularly want you to have an epd for it then a project epd would be the the best route to go down and then to add on to that Pina mentioned averaging so any of these can be averaged um averaging can then be for
A number of reasons so you can have just a single product single manufacturer epd or you can have an industry averaged epd so that could be um where there’s lots of Manufacturers and you’re averaging all of those manufacturers results into one epd um so there’s quite a few industry average dpds out there
For example there’s one for clay bricks um you can also have uh a product grouped epd so they might be similar products in your own range as one manufactur but multiple products so you can average those and you can also have industry averaged product group dpds as well just to complicate things further
Um but they’re not quite as common so in terms of who uses epds um and why they’re important for the future of manufacturing so they’re used by a number of people so they’re used often in building life cycle assessments so they’re used by Architects designers Engineers developers Etc um firstly to
Compare materials and Source more sustainably so that could be right at the early stages of a project where you haven’t yet decided on what materials you’re using yet and you might just be using um comparing different materials to say right if we use this one it would
Have this much carbon in it and if we use this one it would have more or less um they’re also used in the the later stages so actually in procurement and when you’re specifying particular product so maybe you’ve decided that you want to use wood fiber insulation and
Now it’s down to getting to the nitty-gritty of which wood fiber insulation manufacturer has the greenest product so actually comparing manufacturers side by side as well um they’re also used to comp uh to adhere to sustainability compliance standards such as briam or lead um so you they actually get credits for using
Products that have epds so it can help them to achieve those higher standards um and then as I mentioned to actually conduct the whole life building LCA um so again that could be early stages or it could be right through to as built and Reporting on exactly what the
Emissions of that total building are um so in our software we’re the only Central database for every single construction epd so if you publish an epd it should be in there no matter whether you’ve made it with us or not it should be there so manufacturers can
Type in a product search for it um and then select it include a quantity and then that becomes part of their entire building assessment we’ve also got a number of benchmarking features in the software as well so they can actually compare products side by side or they can see
Where a particular product sits within an entire industry um within the country or or globally as well they’re also used by manufacturers so this could be um to compare and Benchmark themselves against competitors so PR mentioned there aren’t many other manufacturers in her industry yet that
Have epds so they are obviously a bit of a front runner in that um but if they did have epds then it would be good for pina to be able to compare her products with her competitors um see where potentially she could reduce the impacts of her
Own and then also um used by suppliers uh so for example pina’s products may have uh Steel in them and PR’s steel supplier could have an epd themselves so that enables Pina to select a very accurate data point for use within her own epd so you can use epds within epds
If that makes sense um so they’re used for for uh actually calculating epds themselves and then also as a marketing tool um so obviously epds are in high demand by Architects developers Etc um so having them available is quite a nice way to get your products to stand out
From a sustainability perspective and also in the software so if you’ve got Architects looking for bricks in the software they’ll type in Brick and everyone with an epd will come up so it it’s giving you exposure to all of those um those those client bases VI as well
So we’ve got about 80 80 of the top 100 um architects in the world using the software at the moment um this is just a slide to show how they might be used in a building life cycle assessment so often because you publish an epd as a PDF you think
That people are just looking at your PDF that’s not necessarily the case if you’re using a life cycle assessment software normally those epds appear as data points So within our software we’ve got these data cards um it enables people to be able to download the epds
If they want to see the PDF but otherwise they’ve just got a snapshot of all of the information that’s in there so they can see the the background information to that data point where it’s been published a description of what the product is and then they can also quick quickly see the environmental
Profile of it as well um just lastly then a bit on our epd generation software so the whole idea of the software is to enable you to bring your epd generation inhouse it’s much cheaper than potentially Outsourcing it um but also it gives you complete control over your data um it
Allows you to kind of manipulate your data um suitably rather than kind of just just doing an epd to tick a box you can actually use the information you’ve got more I guess what prin mentioned earlier is that if your products are quite complex you’ve got a very detailed
Understanding already of what goes into your products um so it can be um a bit easier so within the software you would collect your data so your data um as Pina mentioned is things like your materials you’re using where you’re getting those materials from Transportation distance
And then the energy you’re using in your factory to create your products and then also waste as well um and then the end of life phases you would declare generally on scenarios you then input that data into the software in terms of quantities you pair that with an appropriate carbon
Data point so the software’s got about 30,000 carbon data points in there a lot of that data comes from epds but also a lot of it comes from ecoinvent which is a big Global generic database where you can pick uh generic uh carbon data points for things like materials emissions um and
Waste you then it will automatically do the calculations for you so it will do your LCA and it will create your epd report as well in line with your program operator so we’ve got prever verified templates already for epd Hub and the International epd System and then we
Send it to be verified and published as well providing you want us to obviously the software as well can be used for an R&D tool so if you don’t actually want to publish every time you can use it to do internal calculations and see you know what would happen if I replaced
This product or this material with this one or what would happen if I replaced my energy Supply with solar or renewable energy so you can use it as a bit of a tool to see how you can reduce your emissions as well um in terms of the the process as
Well soina did go through this roughly earlier um but obviously you would have uh your onboarding we would create or we would already have templates available in the software for you so these are basically pre-done life cycle assessments with a generic similar product to yours you can then go in and
Tweak that data to suit you so it’s it’s a nice example to start with rather than starting from scratch um and then obviously there’s the verification and publication as well most of our clients are now using epd Hub um it’s a lot more streamlined uh it’s very quick to publish so it’s
Generally 2 to four weeks um and also you can submit directly from the software to epd HUB and they can see all of the background data in the software rather than having to produce what’s called a background report and then the last little piece here um is it’s quite a busy slide but
It’s just quite a nice summary of what an epd Journey might look like um we’ll share these slides later so if you wanted to actually read it in a bit more detail then you can do um but effectively um the first stage of creating your epds would be your epd
Development strategy um so who would be be inputting this this might be marketing or Business Development they might say right we need these epds because we’re getting a lot of demand for these particular products or these are our bestselling products or maybe you’ve got one of your products involved
In a particular tender where they’re asking for epds so it’s about developing a clear strategy for how many epds you want to produce um in what time frame and then also which products you want to Target as well the next stage would be to do your
Product grouping so um we can help with this but hopefully in the training you’d have a good understanding of all the rules around averaging and scaling Etc um but it’s understanding the differences between your products so normally this would be a technical team or an epd team uh or something like that
Um understanding the the differences and similarities between your products and deciding if you want to group them or if you want to keep them separate this can also have a an advantage for um forecasting costs so if you know roughly how many epds you’re going to publish and whether they’re
Going to be averaged or not you can have a good idea of how much they’re going to cost to verify and publish as well the next stage is your data collection so this could be anyone in the company epds can be a pretty collaborative um project so you’ll be
Collecting data from technical teams Factory managers suppliers understanding where you’re getting products from uh the buying Department potentially as well um you’ll input that data then um and then hopefully you’ll have a full set of data required to complete your epd stage four then is your actual epd
Generation so inputting all of that information into the software in a compliance standard so manipulating that raw data so maybe you’ve got your total factory energy and you need to be able to transfer or allocate that back to a particular product so it’s about uh changing that that um format of the data
Inputting it into the software and then compliant uh producing a compliant epd step between well the step between four and five here is ecodesign this is obviously optional in an Ideal World we would hope that everyone was using the software for ecodesign the whole point
Of doing this is that we want to be able to measure manage and reduce our emissions um so hopefully you would be using it for that as well whether that’s for new products or existing products and then fifth is the the last part is actually using your epd um so
You probably spent a lot of time creating it you’ve probably spent some money developing it as well so you want to make sure you get the best use out of it so you need to make sure your Market a business development teams are promoting them making sure that all of
Your suppliers know that you’ve got them uh you might not realize that your suppliers actually need them or or see them as a valuable tool um so yeah just making sure that they’re out there and and they’re being used as well and that is pretty much it from me
Um before we move on to our Q&A we’ve just got another poll that we’re going to pop on the screen so if if you would like to have a demo with any of us or learn a bit more about the software please click yes if you do not please
Click no um if you click yes we probably will contact you so so only click yes if you definitely do want to actually see the software and learn more it should be on your screen now so the next part is just Q&A and before we go into looking at your
Questions in the chat um I’ve just got a few questions for pina um which I think would be quite useful for people to know um so the first one I guess is what drove you to start creating your epds in the first place yeah so um we had actually been
Receiving requests for epds TM 65s or some kind of life cycle analysis for a few years and then our head of Business Development and sustainability started with the sub CM 65s and we’ve he’s been looking at starting epds for a while now and it finally uh happened last summer
Um and it went from there really perfect and you yourself didn’t have any experience in doing life cycle assessments did you no I didn’t no did you have any experience in like aess sustainability or was it all completely new uh the only time I had ever learned
About it was my GCS um so other than that I had nothing else to go off of I think that was actually one of the challenges that we fa that I personally faced as well so yeah I mean you did incredibly well to produce so many
Epds um so I guess what were the biggest challenges you would say other than than not knowing I guess you just said not knowing much about sustainability um but what were your other biggest challenges for actually creating them yeah so I mean obviously not really know about sustainability I’ve said it before a
Couple times um I think people are getting sick of it we are one of the first in the industry to do so so it wasn’t much to go off of uh in terms of actually how it should look um but I think one of the biggest things that I
Struggled with was even just finding the correct data points when I was doing it um a lot of the time I had to go in and kind of manually add them onto our company account into a separate data list um which was a bit of a struggle
Just trying to figure out exactly what was applicable for our products um again that goes into me not knowing about sustainability and about the specifics of these I’m not a super technical person um but it you know again our Mentor was really helpful with that so
And was that so that was mainly finding the data points that were specific to you or was it actually finding the data as well because you obviously you collected that data quite quickly how did you already did your company already collect that or were you starting from scratch to go and get it
So uh we had been looking at that and compiling data for it for a while already um yeah we had to continuously be in touch with our manufacturers and ask throughout as throughout the onboarding course we continually asking them you know can you specify exactly what type of plastic this is and things
Like that yeah um we also did have to make some assumptions with that because whilst we are one of the main um look suppliers I think is the right word uh they do sell other products and we can’t always account for that in terms of factory level data we did have to use
Factory level data a couple times more for energy than anything else um and we didn’t have like the full weight of the product like however many products uh the factory made in a year so we made some assumptions for that and we had to keep asking them again so that was fa
Struggle yeah yeah no we often here that obviously the longest part of the process is quite often collecting the data um the onboarding training is over a period of time to enable to be able to get data between sessions so you don’t necessarily kind of need to have got it
All to start with um but yeah it’s it’s definitely sometimes a bit of an oversight as to how much time the data collection takes it’s and the actual epd creation is is generally a little bit quicker um obviously you were able to produce I think it was about 26 or 29 EP
PDS or maybe even more in in about two months which I think is probably a record um so what and obviously your products are complex as well it’s not like you were creating epds for really simple products so what was your secret to being able to create so
Many uh just a lot of time and dedication really um yeah it was I had a very strict deadline as well of um I had to go back to University uh in October so it was juggling working on epds from before from around late August and early September and then trying to
Quickly finish them uh as fast as I can it wasn’t really there’s no like trick to it I don’t think you just have to learn the content as best you can and learn from mistakes that’s that’s all the advice I can give on that really
Sure so it was a kind of a fulltime project for you for those two months I guess yes yeah it was um and then the last one I guess is what are hydrotex plans for the future um so will you producing more epds will you be
Bringing out any new products um or do you think you’ll use the software tool for research and development yeah so in the short term we are looking at producing more epds we have at least four more products um that we set that we do want to create upds
For uh we’re always looking at how to better improve our our environmental impact and I think this is going to help our manufacturers look at that too and they’re also always coming up with they’re all making up ideas on how to improve our products and any new
Products that we can make so but that’s a bit out of my depth to be honest no that’s absolutely fine okay thank you it was really interesting um we’ll go into now the Q&A box so if anyone does have any questions um then pop them in there
I’ll start with one at the bottom here from RIT I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce your name sorry if it was wrong um but if you want to create epds for cement manufacturers in Cambodia for example where Baseline data is missing how do you go about this process and how
To start so to create epas for subit manufactur so if you wanted to create epds for a manufacturer no matter where they are located you would have to be able to get some manufacturer specific data from them so so in terms of Baseline data I don’t know if you mean
The data points or the actual kind of the quantities of materials and the manufacturing emissions but you would need to be able to go to that manufacturer and say you know what materials are you using what quantities of materials and you’d need to be able to get that firstand information from
Their manufacturing site as well in terms of the data that you would use there are generic data points for every ingredient that goes into cement there’s there’s tons of epds out there for cement so they’ve they’ the data is there um so you would use that generic
Data if the suppliers of the individual ingredients do not have epds um so that’s how you’d go about it obviously you wouldn’t expect all of your suppliers to have epds it’s just at this stage in time it’s not realistic hopefully in the future it will be um so
Using those generic data points normally from somewhere like Eco event or industry average dpds are are what you would do in that case Adam GRE so what types of data are you collecting over the course of a year to create an epd uh what happens if you’re in a
Country where such data is unavailable or expensive to obtain so over the course of a year so you wouldn’t necessarily have to collect this going forward you can look at retrospective data so you could say what was our last year um so you would need to look at um
The materials you bought what types of those materials uh you’re buying the quantity of the materials you’re buying and um how much of that material is going into each product you’d also one of the main ones that’s I guess probably the harder ones to collect is the manufacturing energy so you would need
To say right our Factory used this much energy over a year um if you make lots of different products you would have to allocate that energy back to a specific product and a specific declared unit so there’s a number of ways to do that which they go over in training but one
Is uh Mass allocation so you look at the mass of your your products that you’re looking at and then the mass of all the products you produced over the year and allocate it in that way another one is done on value so the actual value of the product as
Well um so that’s the kind of data you need to collect um in terms of the country where such data is unavailable I’m assuming you’re not talking about the actual manufacturer data because there will always be manufacturer data sometimes getting it can be be hard but
You should be able to look at that factory and get those energy emissions so again I’m assuming that you’re referring to the actual data points and again you would use the generic data um you don’t have to use country specific generic data there’s also Global averages that you can use there’s
European averages so there would always be something there that you can use if you’re doing a really obscure specific product and the data does not exist which can happen um you would either use a proxy data point which is like a similar data point to what you would
Have used and we can advise on those or potentially you might be able to get in touch with your supplier and if they could do a life cycle assessment you can input that as a private data point into the software as well um so the other one is um does the
Tool have specific uh data for India um yes it does so there are specific uh data points for various countries there aren’t there aren’t generic data points for every single country out there which is where you would use the global or the the European averages um but in in many
Cases there are some for for countries and I know that we do have some for NGS specifically as well um do you have templates for Plastic Products uh yes we do we’ve got templates for various Plastic Products I do not know them all off the top of my
Head um but plastic pipes are one we’ve got different Plumbing Parts and Equipment we’ve got plastic flooring um plastic doors and windows so yeah we’ve got various ones um if you did want to have a full list we’ve got a link which I could send you if you
Wanted to get in touch and it’s got a full list of all of our uh templates available if we don’t have one that’s perfect for you or your products then we can create them uh with additional support hours so it’s like a Consulting project for us to create a bespoke
Template for you and it will save you quite a bit of time and then here’s one from Jacob so do you think it’s possible to do calculations directly in the model for example in Revit you have your epd data in parameters with automatic calculations connected to your dimensions in your building project do
You see any project disadvantage with this um so if you are a architect designer engineer and you want to do a building LCA we have a two-way integration with Revit um so you could uh basically export an entire Revit model into the software it reads the quantities of the materials you’re using
And it also reads the naming Convention of that material and then it automatically pairs it to what it thinks is an appropriate data point and it basically does your LCA for you um you can then obviously go in there and you can tweak those data points if it’s not
Quite the right one um and it will REM remember those naming conventions then and the pairing with the data point so next time that you import it will um map it directly to the one that you mapped it previously um so yeah it’s a huge advantage to do that obviously it’s
Massively time-saving it means you don’t have to go in the software and find every single data point for your building um we’ve got about 16 Integrations with various different softwares currently for the the epd software we don’t really have any direct Integrations we do have an import form
Which a lot of companies prefer to use it’s Excel based so you collect your data in the import form and then you can import that into the software um sometimes it can be a bit quicker to kind of tweak quantities or copy your data and tweak it slightly uh in the
Import form um also if your software has like a bill of materials that you can export in uh Excel format you can export it into the import form and then import it into the software so definitely a time-saving feature um and no no I wouldn’t say there’s any disadvantages with with doing it
Couple more qu minutes left and just a couple more questions so I’ll try and be quick um so Alice says hello great webinar what exactly is the difference between epd Hub and the epd international so they are just two different program operators um neither of them are kind of any better than each
Other um there’s just about 50 program operators out there so um they’re different bodies that basically verify and publish epds uh the main differ es I guess would be their um product category rules and their general program instructions so they have slightly different allowances I guess when it
Comes to averaging scaling um so for example epd Hub allows plusus 50% variation in global warming potential when it comes to averaging products whereas the International epd System allows a plus minus 10% variation um so that’s kind of some of the differences but the nitty-gritty of
It would being in the actual um program operators uh general program instructions um so how are epds ver verified regulated are they open to manipulation um so they are verified uh by verifiers um so every epd has to have a third party verification so we do not
Do that as one click LCA that’s why we pass to epd her or sometimes the International epd System um they’re regulated against the standard so the verified are going to be checking that you have um adhered to all of the standards that you’ve input all of the
Data that you should have input they are obviously not going to know to on to an exact T if everything of you put in there is is perfect uh you probably won’t know either but they have a good idea of the kind of figures that they should be seeing they’ve verified
Thousands of epds so if something looks not quite right then they’re going to be questioning you on it if data is missing they’ll question you on it um likewise if you’re saying you’re using 100% renewable energy they might ask you for copies of your energy certificates and things like that to prove it
Uh one last question here before we finish so no need to collect data such as waste water or CO2 emissions or manufacturing waste yes you do need to collect that information so you would again look at your total annual Energy bill and how much water you used and
Then allocate that back to your particular product or declared unit CO2 emissions would come under uh process direct emissions which are a part of the life cycle assessment um so if you are producing gases during your production process that you have to report on as a factory you would have to include those
In your assessment so you would need to be able to measure those um and the same with waste as well if the data points are not available how many data points can use generic Data before the epd becomes unrealistic um so in terms of the data
Points you use there’s no limit to how many generic data points you can use obviously the quantities of that data is Factory specific to yourselves um the actual data point you’re using can be generic epds are not an exact science they’re as good as you can possibly get
With the data that is available um there’s about 30,000 data points in there so we would hope that you could get it as accurate as you could but in the absence of of product or manufacturer specific data generic data is absolutely fine to use and then I will just do this last
One because it seems unfair to leave one question um so how did you define the range of products that you created uh epd did you group them and if yes what deviations are accepted from the epd provider uh so I guess Pina this might be more one for you actually how did you
Define the range of products that you created um and how did you group them so when I’m talking about a range of products for an epd I’m talking about a range that we sell and then create epds of those um so we have a high mag range
We created that was our first range that we did we created individual epds for all of those and then submitted that for verification um and then we repeated that for our other ranges as well um if you’re talking about averaging that’s slightly different we had to try a few
Different things for the two ranges that we did average um we can because of the there are certain requirements about averaging it’s there’s a 50% change in something I’m sorry I think vity will have to give more specific on that I’ll just tune in because it’s a it’s a 50%
Plus minus variation in terms of the global warming potential and that’s how you could decide if you could average them or not basically yeah so we had to look at that and play around with some of the products to see what would make sense to be put together and also does it even
Work um but that’s very specific to you and your products yeah great okay um and you published with epd Hub which is why it was a plus minus 50% rather than the 10% with International epd System um the recording will be shared sorry we’ve gone slightly over on time but thank you
Everyone for coming um and I hope it was useful bye