The North American Material Baselines Report provides:
A snapshot of the state of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for North American-produced building materials, including:
- Background and methodology
- CLF Baselines
- Appendices
About
The CLF Baseline values represent an estimate of industry-average GHG emissions for construction materials manufactured in North America. An overwhelming majority of the CLF Baselines published in this report are based on a North American industry-wide EPD if one was available at the time of publication. As such, it is appropriate to use this number as a rough estimate of a product type’s embodied carbon before a specific product has been selected or as a reference value against which product-level comparisons can be made.
Each material category has a detailed appendix that includes a description of the embodied carbon impacts, the available EPDs, and summary statistics. The Appendices in this report allow users to better understand the availability of existing industry-wide and product EPDs, and the variability of product types across a category. The snapshot of available EPDs summarized in each Appendix was assembled using the EC3 database in Fall 2022.
Version 2 Updates
Version 2 (August 2023) of the report fixes typos, adds the remaining 8 appendices, and improves accessibility of the report and appendices by adding bookmarks and hyperlinks to the PDF files. There were no changes made to the Baseline Table of Values content.
Acknowledgments
The research team would like to thank Breakthrough Energy for supporting this research and Building Transparency for continued access to the data within the EC3 tool. The team would also like to thank Monica Huang for her careful copyediting and review of the document and Stephanie Carlise for the report graphic design.
Copyright
2023 CLF North American Material Baselines Report is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors
The research team from the Carbon Leadership Forum at the University of Washington College of Built Environments:
- Brook Waldman, Researcher
- Allison Hyatt, Researcher
- Stephanie Carlisle, Senior Researcher
- Jordan Palmeri, Senior Researcher
- Kathrina Simonen, Executive Director
Author contributions: B.W., S.C., A.H & K.S. Conceptualization; B.W., A.H., and J.P. Formal analysis; J.P., S.C., B.W., A.H., and K.S. Writing-review & editing; J.P. Writing-original draft of report; B.W. & A.H. Writing-original draft of appendices; A.H. & B.W. Data visualization in appendices: K.S. Funding acquisition.
Citation
Waldman, B., Hyatt, A., Carlisle, S., Palmeri, J., and Simonen, K. (2023).
2023 Carbon Leadership Forum North American Material Baselines (version 2).
Carbon Leadership Forum, University of Washington. Seattle, WA. August 2023.
http://hdl.handle.net/1773/49965