Kingspan Insulated Panels Announces New Environmental Product Declarations
Kingspan Insulated Panels North America announces brand-new environmental product declarations (EPDs) that provide detailed cradle-to-grave information to architects and building design professionals. The EPDs go a step deeper than is typical by providing more granular data about each specific manufacturing site, each specific product thickness and supplier-specific information which ties into each respective plant.
The new set of EPDs, according to Kingspan, reveal that the company's most thermally efficient QuadCore® insulation core has the lowest global warming potential (GWP) in North America, when compared with other insulated metal panel (IMP) manufacturers. Global warming potential is used as a measure of the embodied carbon of a product. QuadCore® technology is Kingspan’s next generation of self-blended hybrid insulation core backed by a 30-year thermal warranty. QuadCore® delivers outstanding thermal performance, fire protection and health and wellness certification.
The third-party certified EPDs are the result of 12 months of manufacturing data collected at plants in Modesto, California; DeLand, Florida; Caledon, Ontario; and Langley, British Columbia. All four plants manufacture QuadCore®. Like a nutrition label on food, EPDs show raw material extraction, energy use, water use, waste generation and emissions to air, soil and water. For the commonly used 3" IMP thickness, the GWP figure for the product produced in Caledon is 2.59 KgCO2/ft2 representing a 35% reduction from the previous EPD level of 3.98 KgCO2/ft2.
“With these EPDs, architects and design professionals have more insight than ever, when making critical choices that can impact buildings’ embodied carbon emissions,” said Kingspan Director of Sustainability Brent Trenga. “This granularity gives architects the ability to optimize their designs to enable the sourcing of the lowest embodied carbon options appropriate for their project and location.”
Kingspan announced the first of its kind UL-certified, ISO-compliant EPD for IMPs in September of 2011. Kingspan’s EPDs are third-party certified by SCS Global and are part of its mounting effort for transparency and sustainability throughout the manufacturing process and supply chain. Through ambitious supply chain targets, Kingspan aims to reduce the carbon intensity of key raw materials by 50% by 2030.
Kingspan’s 10-year global sustainability program, Planet Passionate, is a strategic pillar of its business strategy with ambitious aims to positively impact three global challenges: Climate change, circularity and protection of the natural world. In this pursuit, Kingspan is accelerating the decarbonization of supply chain operations and products by 2030 while bringing new innovative solutions to the market at a pace required to stay below 1.5°C global temperature rise.
To learn more about Kingspan’s EPDs, click here. More information about Planet Passionate is located at this link.