HPD User Guide Helps with LEED, WELL Product Selection

This and other nuanced questions about how to use HPDs are answered in a new handbook—Project Team User Guide: Using Health Product Declaration (HPD) Open Standard, version 2—which the HPD Collaborative has announced will be available publicly (and for free) in early October. The guide has already been released to members of the Health Product Declaration Collaborative.

The guide walks through how to evaluate whether HPDs meet requirements in LEED v4 and WELL (also see What’s an HPD? Health Product Declaration FAQs) and presents other ways to use the data, including:

• Setting material selection goals
• Screening for high-priority chemicals
• Gauging the chemical hazard profile of a project by comparing HPD data from real product selections against generic products (through the Quartz database, for example)

The guide acknowledges that specialized consultants and third parties will likely need to be engaged for these latter uses of HPDs. However, case studies demonstrate how HPDs are already being put to use to screen for Living Building Challenge Red List chemicals, inspiring company procurement policies to include a preference for product transparency data, and prompting engagement between product teams and their suppliers.

So, what does it means if the checkboxes for “characterized” and “screened” are checked off on a Health Product Declaration (HPD), but the box for “identified” is left blank? Answer: The manufacturer is not disclosing all of the product ingredients by name but is still reporting information about the potential hazards associated with its contents. Bonus point: This kind of HPD can still be used to comply with the LEED v4 Materials credit. See our HPD Quick-Start Guide for visuals.