Another win is in sight for the green building landscape as Abodo Wood publishes an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) to cover their Vulcan Thermally Modified Radiata Pine. The EPD was produced by thinkstep-anz to showcase the environmental credentials of the company’s timber products which are sourced locally from sustainably managed FSC® certified forests in New Zealand. It is the first Australasian EPD to be formally registered with both EPD Australasia and the European ECO Platform. Abodo Wood’s EPD covers their sawn softwood, surfaced, sawn softwood, finger-jointed softwood, and glued-laminated timber (Glulam) products. The company was one of the participating members of industry organisation WPMA’s industry wide EPD for timber in 2019. Their own EPD was done on the back of this industry collaboration.
An EPD is a third-party verified, transparent declaration of a product’s impact across a wide range of environmental indicators. A powerful tool that considers the whole life cycle impacts of products, it can both drive more environmentally sound decision-making and allow companies to communicate the environmental impact of their products. It also provides life cycle data for calculating the impact of wood products at a building level. To learn more about EPDs visit thinkEPD, a microsite dedicated to Environmental Product declarations and their business case.
Construction material based EPDs such as the Vulcan timber EPD play a key role in enabling whole-of-building Life Cycle Assessment as they help specifiers and developers to calculate the environmental impact of construction projects. A key tool in the transition to a green construction sector, the New Zealand Green Building Council allows three points to be awarded for the use of EPDs in Greenstar projects. The versatile tool is also recognised under various other green building certification schemes such as those developed by LEED, Green Building Council of Australia, and Living Building Certification.
Abodo Wood’s EPD is registered under EPD Australasia and can be downloaded here.