When exporting for the BPDO credits, you have two options. The first is the Materials Calculator which is the building product & optimization calculator, the second is your project data sheets, which is all your backup documentation. You will get a zip file for each credit and each option, with all of the backup in its own individual zip file. Currently, you need to upload both of these for your final documentation to USGBC. Within each form, you will upload the materials calculator and then the relevant zip file with all the backup documentation. Export them both and you will get a zip file with all your product data sheets and your final materials calculator, ready to go directly to LEED online.

Sustainable Materials exports available in Green Badger:

• Materials Calculator (LEED Building Product and Disclosure Optimization Calculator) – this is USGBC’s BPDO calculator (Excel) required for submission
• Product Data Sheets (Zip file off all product data sheets. You’ll get a separate zip file for each credit/option with all your EPDs, HPDs, etc). This can be a very large file depending on how many products you’ve tracked, so be patient!

If you’re not finding as many products as you’d think using our search, it’s best to just broaden your search a little bit. For example, if I searched “Sherwin Williams Promar 200 Low-Zero VOC Paint”, I’m not going to get any results. If I was to search a little more broadly – “Sherwin Williams” – now I’ve got all sorts of results, 46 different products, and I can find my paint. So if you use a bunch of keywords that might not show up, it will restrict your search. It is user friendly, so if you misspell something it’ll still show up, so if I put in “sherwun williams” it’ll return the same amount of results, or if I search “promar 200” I can find all of those paints as well. So there you go, broaden your search a little bit, and I’m sure you will find hundreds or thousands of products you can use in your project.

To document your source and raw materials, you’re gonna need a baseline value for your cost, for divisions 3-10, materials only. The easiest way to do that is to take your total schedule values for divisions 3-10 and put that value in here. LEED uses a 45% ratio to establish your materials cost, which becomes the basis of those calculations. You can update that number at any point, or you can use the “actual materials cost” field. If you’re separately tracking all of your contracts and breaking down materials vs. labor, you might have your actual materials cost for divisions 3-10 and put that in here. You’ll see this is currently greyed out, that’s because this value is already in. If I wanted to switch and use the actual materials cost, or vice versa if you entered the actual materials cost, simply delete the value you had and the other will become available. That will reset your total value.

Depending on the size of your project, how many entries you’ve had, and how long you’ve been using it, it may take a couple of seconds to refresh, but just give it a moment and you’ll see you can now enter here. If I delete this value, I will now be able to re-enter here. I’ll note there is an option to auto-sum what is in your log that you can use, that will calculate your values, but unless you’re entering every single product in your log with cost, that’s not going to give you an accurate representation. We think the easiest way is your total construction costs, divisions 3-10, and use the default value. If you track that separately, give the actual materials costs, either way just give it a second and those fields will open up so you can edit them.

A common question is “Why are my dials not updating? I’ve got all these entries in here, why is SRM still 0?” The most common answer is that no value has been entered for total construction cost or actual materials cost, meaning it’s dividing your entries by 0. Once you put in a value, which is required, it will do the calculation. So if I enter in my project cost of $10 million, for total construction cost, it will use the LEED default ratio to calculate that as $4.5 million and now my percentages are calculated. For your EPD and ingredient reporting, sometimes products are not a full product – so if you have a lifecycle analysis that only counts as half a product – LEED does not round up, so this number might really be 61.5, it’s not going to show you 62 because it doesn’t round up.

As with all credits in Green Badger, you always make a new entry by clicking the “add” button in the upper-right-hand corner. There are two options: first, you can search our database by brand name, product name, manufacturer, and even keyword or division number. You can always add your own product if you’d rather upload it or if there’s something we don’t have. 

To search the database, just type the product name – say you have Armstrong ceiling tiles, so type Armstrong – hit search, you’ve got all these different products, so you can scroll through, find the product, and add it to the project. If it’s in the database, we are providing you with all that backup documentation, so all you need to do is add it in and you are good to go. 

It’s best to search broadly. for example, I put “Armstrong” instead of “Armstrong Cirrus Ceiling Tile” because if your spelling’s off or you put in something too different, the system might not return it. So we always suggest you search broadly so you can find your products, simply click “add”, if it’s cost-based you can put it in here, and then save it into your project. 

You can also add multiple products, so if this was your ceiling tile submittal, perhaps you’re using this ceiling suspension system and multiple ceiling tiles, you can simply pick them all and then just add them all into your project, it’ll put multiple products in, update your totals, and you are good to go. If we don’t have a product or you want to upload it yourself, click “add”, and then simply select the option to “create customs”. Then, it’s fill in the blanks: what’s your material, who’s it from, what did it cost, you have the option to enter submittal numbers & subcontractor if you want to use that for tracking in your log, otherwise simply find the option that you have documentation on and fill in the blanks. If you found an EPD we didn’t have, you would simply type in who it’s from, the program operator, what type is it – almost all of them are Product-specific Type III External EPDs – there are other options that you can select, but if it is for a specific product it is most likely Type III External EPDs. Select that option and then upload your EPD. 

Same for any other credit: if you found something with recycled content just check the box, put in your values, upload your cutsheet, and if you have any type of reporting, simply pick from the dropdown menu of the different reporting mechanisms, upload that document, hit “save”, and it will pull it into your log and you are good to go.

There are three credits, with a total of six points available, for the BPDO credits. 

First, it’s essential you are using LEED v4.1 for these credits so make sure to opt-in. You can do so just by toggling in the upper-right-hand corner. I’m not even going to talk about v4 since it makes absolutely no sense to use v4 for these credits. 

Environmental product declarations (EPDs) have two options: option one is to use 20 products for new construction, or 10 for commercial/interiors/core & shell/warehouse, products that have EPDs. You can use a dollar of those products or ten million, doesn’t matter, they all count the same. Once you hit that threshold of 10 or 20 products, you will be earning the point. 

Option two is simply 5 products that have an optimized EPD, which shows a reduction in the global warming potential of those products. There are not that many out there, but you do only need five of them to earn that credit. Sourcing raw materials is one credit, there are two point thresholds: one is at 15% by cost, for products that have things like recycled content and FSC certified wood. There is a second point available at 30%. That number is based off of your total materials cost for divisions 3-10, materials only, not labor. In this case, that’s $4.5 million. So 15% of that number is $700k. I would need $700k of compliant product to earn the sourcing credit.

The material ingredients credit has the same thresholds as EPDs. You need 20 products with transparency documentation for their ingredients on new construction, 10 products on commercial interiors/core & shell/warehouse, and 5 products that have an EPD on ingredient optimization. 

What does that look like? Where is all that documentation? Green Badger is here for you as well. Go to our website, under “resources” at getgreenbadger.com, you will find “The Ultimate Guide to LEED Construction”, which will take you through credit-by-credit. We also provide ebooks that go in detail for every one of those credits, with examples of what is compliant documentation, how you read it, and where should you look to find those products. So if you need some additional information, go to getgreenbadger.com and find our resources, you will have access to all these ebooks which will help you fully understand what you need to do to find compliant products for all your EPDO credits.