By Tristan Roberts, HPDC, Director of Technical and Education Programs
The Health Product Declaration Collaborative (HPDC), working with USGBC and GBCI, has updated its guidance on how to use Health Product Declarations (HPDs) to earn LEED credit under Option 2 of LEED v4 MRc: Building Product Disclosure and Optimization: Material Ingredients.
The update will allow a greater proportion of the close-to-5,000 published HPDs to contribute to LEED.
LT-P1 scores are now allowed for Option 2
Prior to this updated guidance, products with a GreenScreen List Translator score of “LT-P1” did not qualify for use in Option 2 of the Material Ingredients credit in LEED v4. GreenScreen BM-1 or LT-1 scores are still not allowed for Option 2.
LT-P1 scores are now allowed as of March 29, 2019, when HPDC issued this updated guidance.
- All HPDs published after March 29 through the HPD Builder will automatically use the updated LEED Pre-Check, reflecting this change.
- This guidance applies to all LEED projects, both projects registered prior to March 29 and new registrations.
- If you are a manufacturer with an HPD published prior to March 29, you can update the LEED Pre-Check results displaying on your HPD to reflect the new guidance. An HPD with no BM-1 or LT-1 scores that was disqualified from Option 2 because of an LT-P1 score would now qualify for Option 2. Please see this guidance for details on how to perform this update.
- If you are a LEED project team and you want to take advantage of this updated guidance, review the “Published Date” of the HPD (on the bottom of Page 1). If the Published Date is prior to March 29, 2019, the LEED Pre-Check for Option 2 will not reflect this updated guidance. If the Pre-Check is shown as not compliant with Option 2, you can review the “Content in Descending Order of Quantity” on page 1 to see if compliance would be affected by this new guidance. If the worst GreenScreen score is LT-P1 (there are no BM-1 or LT-1 scores), the HPD may be compliant with Option 2. We recommend project teams request the manufacturer re-publish the HPD to update the LEED Pre-Check calculation. You can send a message to the manufacturer with this request using the messaging feature of the HPD Public Repository.
If you need assistance with understanding this updated guidance, reviewing HPDs for compliance, or re-publishing an HPD, please contact HPDC customer support.
This updated guidance only addresses LEED v4. HDPC is developing guidance covering LEED v4.1 during the current LEED v4.1 beta period, and plans a major announcement for that later this year.
Additional Background for this Updated Guidance
The following provides more detailed description and background of this change.
For compliance with Option 2 the Material Ingredients credit, HPDs are used to document products that have fully inventoried chemical ingredients to 100 ppm that have no GreenScreen Benchmark-1 (BM-1) hazards. The BM-1 score means that an ingredient is a chemical of high concern, whereas Benchmark-4 substances are safer and preferred, and BM-2 and BM-3 are in the middle.
In the GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals system, Benchmark scores are based on a comprehensive toxicological assessment. GreenScreen’s system also offers List Translator (LT) scores, which are based on screening of a substance against authoritative hazard lists. The GreenScreen score of LT-1 is applied to substances that have not undergone a full GreenScreen assessment, but if they did, would likely earn a BM-1 score. Thus LT-1 and BM-1 scores are derived in different ways but merit the same level of hazard concern.
HPDC and Clean Production Action (CPA), which operates GreenScreen, have jointly interpreted the LEED v4 credit language as applying equally to LT-1 and BM-1 substances, and the U.S. Green Building Council and GBCI also use this interpretation in identifying LEED-compliant HPDs.
One additional score is also relevant. In the GreenScreen system, LT-P1 scores mean that if a substance went through a full GreenScreen assessment, it would possibly be rated BM-1. When LEED v4 was first introduced in 2013, HPDC, CPA, the U.S. Green Building Council, and Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI) jointly interpreted Option 2 as also excluding LT-P1 substances.
However, the shared goal of these organizations is to encourage engagement with material transparency and health tools, and the market feedback has been that treating LT-P1 substances as equivalent to BM-1 is too restrictive at this time. Thus in coordination with USGBC’s introduction of LEED v4.1 in 2019, HPDC has revised its guidance—and our LEED Pre-Check protocol—to allow for LT-P1 substances for Option 2 compliance. This change became effective in the HPD Builder and its LEED Pre-Check as of March 29, 2019.
In summary, BM-1 and LT-1 scores are not allowed for products to contribute to Material Ingredients Option 2, while all other GreenScreen Benchmark (BM) and List Translator (LT) scores are allowed.
LEED project teams can quickly find LEED-compliant HPDs in the HPD Public Repository. Manufacturers affected by this change are encouraged to review this guidance.
Tristan Roberts is Director of Technical and Education Programs for HPDC. You can reach him with comments and feedback at troberts@hpd-collaborative.org.