The HPDs you already have are now a path into WELL
The Works with WELL pre-check is live in HPD Builder. It reads the HPDs you have already published and tells you which WELL features your products align with — no second submission, no re-entered data.
On August 18, HPDC and the International WELL Building Institute hosted a joint session on something that went live earlier this month: a Works with WELL pre-check inside HPD Builder.
The short version is that a manufacturer who has already published an HPD can now open it, run a pre-check, and find out which WELL features that product aligns with. Nothing is re-entered. Nothing is assembled a second time.
Why this matters
More than 1,000 manufacturers have voluntarily published over 18,000 HPDs covering more than 40,000 products. That is a large body of completed disclosure work.
Until now, using it to gain recognition in another program meant starting over — a new form, a new package, the same underlying facts entered again. The cost of transparency was being paid repeatedly, by the companies that had already done the most.
That is the problem this collaboration removes. As Wendy Vittori put it on the call, the goal has always been to make disclosure so affordable and so straightforward that every product can have an HPD and every project team can use it. Work that only counts once works against that.
The collaboration has been a long time coming. Wendy and IWBI’s Rodolfo Perez noted on the call that the two organizations first discussed doing something concrete around 2018 and 2019, and that HPDC and IWBI have been in conversation for essentially the whole of IWBI’s existence. This is the first time it has taken the form of a shared technical process rather than mutual recognition.
What Works with WELL is — and what it is not
This is worth stating plainly, because it is the question we get most.
Works with WELL is a mark, not a product certification. IWBI does not operate a testing laboratory and is not a label competing with the certifiers already in this space. What the mark does is show how a product contributes to WELL strategies — the chemical restrictions, the emissions thresholds, and the disclosure requirements already written into the WELL Building Standard.
Rodolfo made the underlying logic hard to argue with: the first word in HPDC is Health. The first concept in WELL is health. Both organizations are working on the same problem from different ends.
For scale: WELL is in use in more than 12 countries, across roughly six billion square feet.
What the pre-check actually checks
Milla Marcano, HPDC’s Technical Manager, demonstrated it live. Inside HPD Builder, the tab that used to read “LEED and program pre-checks” now reads LEED, WELL and program pre-checks, with a Works with WELL tab alongside the others.
It evaluates your HPD data against the five WELL v2 Materials features that bear on material health:
- X01, Fundamental Material Precautions — the precondition covering asbestos, mercury, and lead, with lead handled separately for electronics, paints, and plumbing products.
- X05, Enhanced Material Restrictions — which branches by product category.
- X06, VOC Restrictions — covering both content and emissions.
- X07, Materials Transparency — with three paths: a complete HPD at the 1,000 ppm threshold, a complete HPD at 100 ppm, and a third-party verified HPD.
- X08, Materials Optimization — which looks at ingredients and at certifications relating to material health performance.
Each feature reports alignment with the reasoning attached, so a product that does not align comes back with the specific cause — a substance on a screening list, a category that does not apply — rather than a bare no. Each card links to the underlying feature language in the WELL Building Standard.
One detail worth knowing: a complete, published HPD already aligns you with at least one WELL feature before you check anything else. The disclosure itself is the first contribution.
Where the data goes
The pre-check result is not part of your HPD. It does not appear in the report and it does not render in the PDF.
It is a separate data set, shared with IWBI through HPDC’s API. IWBI uses it to identify manufacturers whose products are candidates for the program. Designations then come back to us, and products that hold one are marked in the HPD Public Repository and surfaced in the dashboard available to HPDC members.
That designation also reaches HPDC’s API data partners — the workflow tools and product libraries where project teams actually specify. Andre Baros of Acelab raised this on the call, and it is the part manufacturers most often miss: publishing does not just place a document in the Repository, it moves the result to where specification decisions get made.
If your HPD covers multiple products, use the SKU field. HPDC’s grouping guidelines let one HPD represent several products where they share at least 90 percent of their inventory, hold common certifications, and are functionally similar. Listing the individual product identifiers is what tells IWBI the alignment covers all of them.
How to get started today
- Open your product in HPD Builder and go to LEED, WELL and program pre-checks.
- Select the Works with WELL tab and run the pre-checks that apply to your product.
- Read the feedback on any feature that does not align. Much of it is addressable.
- Publish. If the HPD is already published, publish again — that updates the record and sends the pre-check data.
- Contact IWBI to enroll.
On timing: because the material health claims have already been checked by the pre-check, the remaining review at IWBI is expected to be considerably faster than the program’s normal path.
What comes next
More is being added — an option to run every pre-check at once, clearer reporting on features a product is not eligible for, and a prompt before publication reminding you to run your pre-checks.
If you have not looked at the pre-checks in HPD Builder recently, this is a good moment. There are now three tabs of them covering different programs, and they run together. Alignment work you do for one program is visible against the others in the same place.
Watch the session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rESfyMI8BU
Milla’s demo begins at about 19 minutes, and the Q&A runs the final twenty.
