The National Ready Mixed Concrete Association (NRMCA) recently verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) for Knife River Corp. The EPD covers 479 mix designs produced at the Coffee Lake, Hillsboro, Linnton and Sundial plants in Portland, Ore. The EPD was created by Knife River utilizing the Cement Sustainability Initiative’s Environmental Product Declaration Tool (CSI EPD).
The CSI EPD Tool was developed to facilitate the generation of sector-specific EPDs for cement and concrete. The cloud-based tool is designed to be easy-to-use to facilitate the overall process and reduce the costs of preparing environmental impact information from cement and concrete production. Knife River’s EPD was verified by the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute.
To date, the U.S. ready mixed concrete industry, including material suppliers, have 34 verified EPDs with a total of 10,042 mixes from 2,761 plants. The growth of EPD activity has doubled in 2018, with expectations to continue due to LEED v4 being discovered in construction documents and specifications.
NRMCA promotes Strength Through Transparency for competitiveness in the green building marketplace and the trends toward product and company transparency as part of the Build With Strength campaign. The campaign is a coalition of architects, builders, engineers, emergency services personnel, and policymakers with the mission to educate the building and design communities on the benefits of ready mixed concrete.
