Request or require Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) that show a % reduction below the National Ready Mix Concrete Association’s (NRMCA) regional benchmarks.
NRMCA is the national industry association for ready mix concrete producers. As a service to their members, NRMCA produced a national average EPD by surveying their members about the impacts of the production practices. This proactive strategy allows individual concrete producers to compare their plant specific EPDs to the regional or national averages for various mix strengths. Since NRMCA reports the average, one would expect half the producers in a region to be above the average and half to be below. Therefore, to encourage the selection of concrete mixes that perform better than the regional averages, government purchasers could request or require concrete bids to show a percent improvement below the regional averages for a given material class. For example, a government could request that EPDs submitted for a project show a 20% reduction of carbon impacts compared to the regional benchmarks. The big advantage of this approach is that it is performance based rather than prescriptive specifications. Performance based specifications allow for the most flexibility and creativity of the contractor to meet those specifications compared to the minimum and maximum SCM approaches described below.
NRMCA’s industry average EPD can be found here:
http://www.nrmca.org/sustainability/EPDProgram/Downloads/NRMCA%20EPD%2012.07.2014.pdf
NRMCA’s regional benchmark mixes can be found here: