Sustainable Minds®, the only end-to-end product transparency solutions provider for building product manufacturers, today announces the beta launch of its latest tool, the Transparency Catalog™ now with Project Builder & Library. Designed to address the challenges architects, engineers, construction companies and owners (AECOs) face, Project Builder & Library is the first end-to-end collaborative workflow solution for sourcing high-performance materials that meet carbon impact and human health goals. Project Builder & Library is available in private beta.

Building on seven years of transparency data creation, collection, and curation, Sustainable Minds has created the most comprehensive transparency documentation dataset available (all EPDs and all material ingredient disclosures from all building product manufacturers making products for the North American market), organized by CSI MasterFormat® section – now with a seamlessly combined, highly-developed workflow tool. 

An Urgent Solution for High-Performance Low Carbon Construction

Transparency Catalog Project Builder & Library uniquely answers the urgent need for a comprehensive solution that includes both a robust, curated, and continually updated dataset together with a collaborative workflow environment.  This means teams can now make informed selection, specification and procurement decisions that align with performance, carbon and human health goals – particularly those laid out in the growing number of industry commitments, challenges and pledges. 

The need is even more urgent as construction companies are becoming increasingly vertically integrated, requiring that people across the organization have access to the same content and tools. Now the industry can access a complete solution. 

“Since the Transparency Catalog launched in 2016, it has been the most comprehensive, curated source for AECOs to find all the brands investing in product transparency documentation for products available in North America. Our commitment is to radically simplify finding, understanding, and using this technical information to reward manufacturers for doing the difficult and important work of evaluating, disclosing, and reducing the life cycle environmental and human health impacts of their products. Our goal is to help accelerate transformation of the built environment,” said Terry Swack, Founder and CEO of Sustainable Minds. She continues: “The addition of Project Builder & Library takes our commitment to the next level. Developed with a user-centered process involving hundreds of interviews with AECOs and manufacturers, Project Builder & Library addresses the challenges they all face daily.” She concludes: “It is the first true end-to-end workflow solution enabling collaboration across a building project’s life cycle for teams to find the right materials, build and preserve knowledge, save time, reduce costs, demonstrate delivery on industry commitments, and create actually higher-performing built environments.”

Critical Data in One Click 

Sustainable Minds Transparency Catalog is the most comprehensive, curated and continually updated source of building and construction products for high-performance, low-embodied carbon buildings. It currently contains over 2,050 manufacturers and trade organizations with products and documentation in 27 MasterFormat® divisions and 1,250+ sections. 20 new manufacturers on average are added monthly.

In one click, powerful MasterFormat filtering enables AECOs to find every manufacturer and their products with transparency disclosures, in each division and section, making it possible to do in seconds what has taken hours, days or couldn’t be done at all.

Project Builder & Library operationalizes product selection and closes the gaps in workflow, data and tools between each stage – from design to specification, planning, building and management – revolutionizing the end-to-end process for teams. Key features include:

• Creating new flexible workflows to collaboratively create projects and reusable project-type templates.
• Export projects to the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), the cornerstone tool from nonprofit Building Transparency, to support quick project set up to plan and compare buildings. 
• A centralized Favorite Products Library for users to easily capture, share, discuss and distribute knowledge; any type of document from other sources can be easily added. Each user can also save favorites in their own personal library.
• Access to manufacturer expertise to provide support re. samples, sourcing, local reps, distribution, etc…
• Creating an unlimited number of projects and templates, saving an unlimited number of products in libraries, and sharing projects with an unlimited number of collaborators inside and outside your organization to find all project and product information all in one place.

The Trusted Source for EPDs 

The increasing priority on low-carbon materials for public and private procurement is making decisions more complex. Sustainable Minds’ knowledge and credibility as a program operator who develops and publishes product category rules (PCR) and EPDs and as a life cycle assessment (LCA) services provider, makes them uniquely qualified to build the industry’s most comprehensive EPD database that includes only EPDs from qualified program operators and generator tools. Transparency Catalog is the only product data platform containing all EPDs for products in North America. EPDs can be easily found and filtered by:

·         Product-specific EPDs

·         Optimized EPDs for LEED v4.1

·         Industry-average EPDs

·         EPDs eligible for Buy Clean California

AECOs can instantly source building materials with the lowest embodied carbon impact in every MasterFormat section. Transparency Catalog and EC3 have had a data partnership since EC3’s launch in 2019. Transparency Catalog visually displays EC3 quintile data (e.g., best 20%, 40%, etc.) to identify a product’s embodied carbon impacts relative to others in the category at a glance. ‘Filter by quintile’ enables AECOS to easily make low-carbon material choices that meet their selection requirements in one click.

“The availability of this new tool from Sustainable Minds is an important step forward for the built environment sector as more professionals in the space commit to reducing carbon emissions in their projects,” said Stacy Smedley, Executive Director of Building Transparency. “We’re proud that our EC3 tool is being leveraged within Project Builder & Library to provide valuable, real-time insights into the potential impacts of specification and procurement decisions. Collaborating with like-minded organizations to make real progress toward climate change is critical, which is exactly what we are doing with Sustainable Minds.” 

The Project Builder & Library private beta is now available for a select group of registered users and will be available to all this summer. Sign up for a free Transparency Catalog account to be notified when it goes live: https://transparencycatalog.com/account/register. 

Note, manufacturers with EPDs are already included in the Transparency Catalog with a free listing. Contact Sustainable Minds for information on how to activate and add products to take advantage of Project Builder & Library key benefits.