While various transparency labels such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), Health Product Declarations (HPDs), and Cradle to Cradle Certified Products have received a great deal of attention under LEED v4, project teams can also be rewarded by choosing products from manufacturers that have publicly released information from their raw materials suppliers indicating extraction locations, a long-term commitment to ecologically responsible land use, efforts to reduce environmental harms from extraction and/or manufacturing processes, and dedication to voluntarily meeting applicable standards or programs that address responsible sourcing criteria.
Under the Materials and Resources Credit: Building Product Disclosure and Optimization – Sourcing of Raw Materials, project teams can achieve a point for the disclosure component by using at least 20 different permanently installed products (from five different manufacturers) that meet either of the following criteria:
- Products sourced from manufacturers with self-declared reports (valued at one half of a product)
- Products sourced from manufacturers with third-party verified corporate sustainability reports (CSRs) that address the extraction operations and activities associated with the product’s supply chain.