HPD Project Team Guide
Ever needed help navigating health product declarations (HPDs)? Are you seeking out green building certifications? Are you interested in getting more involved in material health? If so, read more about how the HPD Project Team User Guide can help you.
The Health Product Declaration Project Team Guide
The Project Team Guide provides project teams with practical “how to” information for using HPDs. The guide offers background information for the HPD Open Standard to help you better understand the format, what an HPD report contains, and how the information can be used.
Periodic Updates to HPD Open Standard
The HPD Open Standard is revised on a periodic basis, to reflect learning and best practices in reporting, disclosure and transparency regarding building products and associated health information. In July 2022, HPDC fully implemented HPD Open Standard version 2.3. The current User Guide reflects these updates. For a deeper dive on HPD v2.3, users can also read about the newest standard here.
Do I Need the Project Team Guide?
If you’re an architect, interior designer, contractor, specifier, or other project team member involved in building material evaluation, this guide is absolutely essential for you and anyone else using or creating HPDs.
This is the first User Guide for the HPD Open Standard. Material health is new territory for many project teams, so they lack toxicologists, industrial hygienists, and other experts to help them navigate the process. That’s where we come in.
The User Guide is a practical “how-to” template to help Project Teams using HPDs to support material health programs and incorporate health considerations in specification and selection of building products. The guide can help teams meet client and sustainable building certification requirements, such as LEED and WELL.
Once we can know what is in the products we build with, we begin to have the opportunity to select those that will result in healthier buildings. This Guide explains how to take these steps today.
How Does the Guide Work?
The User Guide provides detailed, step-by-step instruction on how to integrate reporting, disclosure and transparency practices into the project plan. This is especially helpful for project teams who have not developed their own methodologies for integrating material health-related activities into their projects.
Included in the User Guide are “Best Practices” that can accelerate the learning curve in introducing these activities, and increase confidence in executing those activities.
The User Guide also includes detailed explanations and definitions of HPD terms and concepts, oriented toward use by architects, designers and other professionals who are not experts in those underlying fields (like chemistry, material science, toxicology or industrial health). The guide helps simplify everything you need to know and makes the HPD format more user-friendly.
If your team is seeking green building certifications, the User Guide will help you understand and prepare the appropriate documentation for health product declaration credits, including LEED v4 Materials and Resource credits and WELL Building Feature 97.
As the HPD Open Standard is updated and revised periodically, new versions of the User Guide will also be made available, to reflect those changes. Be sure to use the version of the Guide that corresponds to the HPDs you are working with, if relying on the Guide for version-specific information.