July 24, 2019

LEED v4 Compliant Drywall with EDPs and HPDs

Drywall and gypsum board are on every construction project in the country, but did you know that they can easily earn you multiple EPDS and HPDs for your LEED projects?

Gypsum Board for the LEED!

Pound that Monster energy drink, get revved up, and cock your fist, cause we’re talking drywall. If you’re one of those hip kids down with the latest memes on the IG, you’ve seen Kyle. If you don’t know what a meme is, or what IG is in reference to, well probably not so much. Either way, the main point here is drywall, or gypsum board (but not sheetrock, which is a brand name!).

The point of the meme is that Kyle loves to punch drywall for whatever reason. But for the Badger, the only punching is some gyp board punching your ticket to earn points in the BPDO credits! That’s right – a product that is on literally every single construction project in the country and very easily earn you multiple EPDS and HPDs. Well gosh darn how, you might be asking yourself?

For starters, every project has some gyp board somewhere. And there are so many iterations that all count as separate products under LEED that you can wrack them up.

Here’s just a few examples of drywall that have EPD/HPDs:

  • Type X
  • Type C
  • Fire Rated
  • Mold Resistant
  • Exterior
  • Shaft liner
  • Tile backer
  • Glasmat
  • Joint setting compound
  • Joint tape

And that’s just off the top of the head! We’re guessing you use a few of those products on your jobsites already.

Badger Tips:

From what we’ve seen, Certainteed and USG currently hold the lead, as they’ve got both product specific EPDs and HPDs for a number of products. National Gypsum and American Gypsum have extensive product lists, but they are limited to HPDs. If you’re under LEED v4, there are industry-wide EPDs for Type X Gypsum and Glas-Mat Gypsum, but the EPDs don’t look like they comply with LEED v4.1 requirements.

Either way, if you can use one of the manufacturers above, you’ll know out a quarter to a half of your EPD/HPD counts in your drywall package alone. Just don’t punch any holes in it once it’s been hung!


Download your Free LEED v4 Product Data Submittal Coversheet

There are some pretty easy best practices that can really facilitate the documentation for materials and even low-emitting products.

Here’s one that you think would be commonplace, but at least in this Badger’s neck of the woods (literally), we don’t see all that frequent – using a required LEED cover sheet for all subcontractors. By having a coversheet, where you require the subcontractor to provide cost and any relevant LEED data (recycled content percentages, distance from extraction and manufacture, VOC content, etc), you get all this information upfront. Or reject the submittal and send it back. Pretty straightforward.

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