From hurdle to marketing tool, making money with product transparency

With 450-plus brands — representing hundreds of categories and thousands of products — the SM Transparency Catalog™ brings together all manufacturers who have made the commitment to product transparency. Most importantly, it presents their information in a well-designed, simple and standardized way, making it easy for green building professionals to find credibly greener and healthier products to meet rating system requirements and build higher performing buildings.

Celebrating All Brands Making Credibly Greener & Healthier Products for the Built Environment

CAMBRIDGE, MA – OCT 18, 2016 -- Sustainable Minds, the first cloud software solutions provider and program operator to deliver simple, understandable and meaningful product environmental reporting, has introduced the SM Transparency Catalog™ – another first in its suite of Transparency Products. Launching with 350+ brands, representing hundreds of categories and thousands of products, the SM Transparency Catalog brings together all manufacturers who have made the commitment to product transparency – and presents their information in a simple, standardized and consistent way. The SM Transparency Catalog is the only source:

• Of products with transparency disclosures ever assembled — in the cloud
• To provide BOTH environmental and material health disclosures that qualify for LEED v4, Green Globes, the Well Building Standard and the Living Building Challenge –- from all manufacturers, all program operators and all material disclosure rating systems
• To make products with transparency disclosures easy to find for AEC professionals — free access, no login
• Designed to send users to manufacturers’ websites for more information

Program Operator Consortium welcomes Canadian standards developer CSA Group and global software and LCA services provider thinkstep

Los Angeles, October 5, 2016 — The green building industry’s first and leading consortium of program operators announced today at Greenbuild the addition of two new members and an enhanced technical advisory board. CSA Group is now a member, while thinkstep is an affiliate member.

This marks the first anniversary of the Program Operator Consortium (POC), which launched last year to provide simpler, standardized and more useful environmental product transparency solutions and to reduce complexity in the marketplace. The consortium serves as an expert resource and advocate for creating product category rules (PCRs), reviewing life cycle assessment reports (LCA), and verifying and publishing environmental product declarations (EPDs).

Sustainable Minds^®, a B2B cloud provider of environmental product transparency applications, services and data, has introduced the 2016 SM Transparency Report™ / EPD Framework bringing major advancements to the process of creating and delivering environmental product transparency reports.

Since the Program’s inception in 2014, the goal has been to reduce creation time and costs while increasing usefulness and value. The SM Transparency Report™, Sustainable Minds’ brand of EPD, is designed to inform greener purchase decisions by making LCA and environmental performance information understandable and meaningful, in three pages, in the cloud. They are strategic marketing tools that turn disclosure into brand value by integrating product transparency into product marketing to build a credibly greener brand.