Features Aggregates Business Carbon Neutral Net Zero
Road To Net Zero digs into the world of life cycle assessments and EPDs

On July 21, Rock To Road magazine, in collaboration with MB Crusher, hosted a webinar roundtable discussion explore the complex impacts of Canada’s net-zero goals on the roadbuilding and aggregates sectors, and how tools such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) may help companies navigate the path ahead. 

The discussion, moderated by Rock to Road’s associate editor Jack Burton, provided an overview of the benefits that life cycle assessments (LCA) and EPDs can bring to operations, along with how data tracking practices can help you win bids and stay sustainable. 

Joining the roundtable were:

• Mate Jurkin, GTA asphalts plant manager with Miller Paving Limited
• Kevin Garrahn, life cycle analyst with Athena Sustainable materials Institute
• William Gowdy, technical director – aggregates, with SLR Consulting.

Below is an edited and condescened portion of the conversation. The complete video is available at www.rocktoroad.com or by clicking on the QR code below. 

RTR: Bill, how important is data tracking and lifecycle assessment when it comes to moving operations closer to net zero goals? 

Bill: It’s everything, you can’t produce an EPD without having that in place. It’s not necessarily a short-term thing, you want to have some history on your operations. A lot of it is part of management of your general business — understanding your utilities, your natural gas, your electricity, the fuel consumption at your at your operations — but also tracking things like waste and water. A lot of what you’re going to be doing is compiling this information that gives you your baseline assessments as to where you are.

RTR: Kevin, with the work you’re doing over at Athena, how important is tracking and life cycle assessment (LCA) to achieving these net zero goals? Given your LCA and EPD work, how do they contribute towards that?

Kevin: First, just a very brief background on what an LCA is before I jump into its use. An LCA is a scientific technique for estimating the environmental impact associated with a product or service over the course of its life. We’re collecting all the inputs and outputs from manufacturing processes, which we call flows.

This takes into account stuff like how much fuel you’re using, or how many explosives you’re using if you’re doing aggregate-production; kind of like an itemized list of everything coming in and out of your plant. 

All of that gets tied to background data sets and calculated to produce or estimate your environmental impact. Life cycle assessments look at a variety of different metrics, the most important of which is carbon intensity. But there’s a few others as well, about 15 or 20, such as acidification potential, waste generated and water usage.

Results for LCA studies and EPDs are presented per unit of production – for instance, if you’re looking at aggregates or asphalt, it’s typically per ton of production. When you get the results for your LCA, it’s going to give you a better understanding of your environmental impact across all of these categories, specifically carbon intensity, that’s the one everyone’s caring about these days. 

It will also give you some of the hot spots within your manufacturing that are the highest contributors to your environmental impact, such as on-site fuel use, utilities use, natural gas or electricity. LCAs are a good way to pinpoint where some of those hotspots are, and might help you plan some strategies for reducing your impact.

RTR: Mate, with your own work at Miller Paving and moving the company’s operations closer to its net zero goals, how important is this practice of tracking the data and implementing these LCAs? 

Mate: EPDs are very, very new, right? We were the first to do it here in Canada, and I think it’s only been about a month as of right now. But the process itself… we’ve always been tracking, always looking at it, but there was always the component of validation. It was always, ‘OK, if you do this process, how much are you going to save? How do you validate that number?’ And it took a lot of time to validate, justify and understand it. 

With the LCAs, EPDs and these tools coming in, what’s been really beneficial is it tells us the data. What we’ve really seen the last month is the data it’s showing us and helping us make these decisions. One thing we do is focus on the manufacturing side of it and say, ‘OK, how much can we reduce it from the manufacturer side in terms of natural gas? In terms of intensity per ton?’ 

What it really opened up our eyes to is actually on the material selection point of view. So, with material selection, how much is virgin aggregate? How far away is it coming from? Is it quarried? Is it a natural sand and gravel? The biggest input for us is the asphalt cement: are there ways of reducing asphalt cement? How much does that actually reflect on it as well? 

When you put it all together, these EPDs are really helping us dive into the hotspots and everything else, to really show us what it is. It’s a very professional document that we’ve able to show to our customers. So, we’re using it internally for justification on new technologies to reduce the carbon footprint, but also when we go see our end use customers. 

Our customers are like, ‘how do we sell this to our customers — the parking lot owners, the road municipalities, everyone else?’ And it’s really good: it’s a very professional document that’s third party verified. It has our name on it, as well as theirs. It’s a really great tool that we’ve already seen very good success on. 

RTR: What is an EPD and how does it drive operations closer to carbon efficiency?

KEVIN: EPDs are basically just the publicly-available results from an LCA study. LCA studies are going to have lots of confidential information in it based on your specific manufacturing facility, and we don’t want to include that information in public communications. An EPD is basically taking the results from all of that confidential background information and posting it. They’re primarily a transparency document that outlines the environmental impacts of a particular product or service. 

The way I like to think of it is, It’s kind of like a nutrition label for food in terms of the food’s impact on your body, but instead, it’s for a product, and outlines the product’s impact on the environment over a wide range of categories.

RTR: Beyond having these numbers transparently, what are the benefits of an operation having an EPD?

KEVIN:  The first is just getting some sort of baseline for where you’re at in terms of environmental impact. It can be really helpful just knowing where you’re at, especially for comparing yourself to industry averages or standards, to see how you’re doing in comparison to everyone else. It will also pinpoint the hotspots for you, and help you identify strategies for where you could improve.

RTR: Mate, could you talk about the history and development of Miller’s EPD program? How you were involved in it and, given that we’re now a month out from its launch, are there any results or feedback that you could share on how it’s been going?

Mate:  A lot of fears with an EPD was how much extra administrative work it was going to take, in terms of what needs to be tracked and how we’re going to track it. We had an Excel spreadsheet, and we went through starting to track the data, and then working closely with NAPA (National Asphalt Pavement Association) and their developers, we got the tool. It took a few iterations, I won’t lie, because they were trying to transition it from US to Canada. 

As you’re going through it, like anything, you come up with some hiccups. We worked through all the hiccups. We started with one asphalt plant, which was our Whitby plant, and once we got it through a few iterations, it wasn’t that bad. Because what does it ask for? It asks, what’s your production? How much is used in terms of water, energy, or anything to do with production. 

The best part of the other side is the recipes. We have our mix designs, which we already give  to the owners of what we’re doing. So, you put all those inputs in, and once you establish it, it probably takes about half an hour to an hour to establish the plant. It’s very user friendly, and as we went from plant to plant to plant, it got lot quicker. Once you actually have the design to copy from one plant to another, it probably takes 15 minutes until it’s ready to print off and you can use it wherever you like.

RTR: Bill, when looking at the supply chain, an EPD might mean something very differently for the producer of the materials versus the end user of those materials. Do you have any insights when it comes to how EPDs’ value is different for people on the material supplier side compared to those on the user side?

Bill:  On the user side, basically you’re getting environmentally-conscious customers now. They’re starting to choose products and make purchases based on what the environmental footprint is. You’ll see it more from municipalities and governments more so at first, but it’s going to trickle down through the whole private sector as well. They’re going to start making decisions, not only on price points, but also on carbon footprints.

RTR: Now that we’ve established what these tools are and how they work, I’d like to look at the steps that our audience can take to make the best use of them. Kevin, what does this process look like for any operation out there that wants to implement EPDs? Is there any advice you have for companies interested in this, or challenges that they should be mindful of?

KEVIN: I’ll start off with kind of high-level steps of what it looks like to create your EPD. The first is going to be scope development. That’s going to be looking at what do you want to include within this EPD, how many mix designs do you want to include, and what plants do you want to include. All of that kind of feeds into the next step of the data collection.

Once you have the scope defined, now we need to figure out what kind of data we need to collect, and from what facilities. Once the scope is defined in the data that’s all been collected, then we’d move into the LCA modeling, which is where you’d start using the tools that we’ve been referring to, to get an idea of your environmental impact. 

Once the model is complete, then we’d get into the creation of the final documents, that would be the EPD document, and typically a LCA background report summarizing the LCA study with third-party verified EPDs. Once all of those steps are complete, you’d move into sending the EPD and background report to a program operator for third party review, such as ASTM or NAPA. 

The biggest challenge we see within the EPD process for manufacturers is that data collection phase. Ensuring accuracy in the current data is really crucial to the accuracy of the EPD. The tricky thing is the data can come from a wide variety of sources: you could have total production based off sales records, weigh scales; you could have purchase records used for tracking your diesel. Basically, you’re grabbing this information from all these different parts, and it can be somewhat overwhelming, and definitely challenging at times, for manufacturers to even start that process. 

Typically it’s an iterative process. How I work with EPDs with manufacturers is they’ll give us the data, we will review the data, and typically we’ll find something that maybe looks a little bit off, might need some more diving into to get a little more details on, and we’ll go back and forth, typically about two to three times, until the data is final. When the manufacturers are comfortable, then we’ll move forward with the modeling. 

I guess one piece of advice I could give is to try to get an idea of where you’re going to pull this data from ahead of time if you can, and to try tracking it internally before you start the EPD development process just to make it a little more efficient and less painful.

• Tweet

• Cat 903 compact wheel loader has 17% more horsepower than previous model
• MAJOR releases new advanced polyurethane strip variant