ICC Evaluation Service (ICC-ES) and Sustainable Minds LLC have announced a strategic initiative to promote product transparency (environmental performance and material health) and conformity assessment in high-performance building design and construction. 

The collaborative effort between two organizations dedicated to advancing the built environment will benefit building product manufacturers, design and construction professionals, facility managers, owners, and building officials by expanding awareness, adoption, and use of high-performance, code-compliant, and innovative building products and materials.

Aligned in their missions to deliver industry-leading solutions through strategic collaboration, ICC-ES and Sustainable Minds bring complementary strengths to the initiative. Sustainable Minds is the only end-to-end product transparency solutions provider for building product manufacturers today. The company is an ISO 14025 EPD / PCR program operator committed to understandable and reliable reporting, providing LCA services and delivering innovative digital tools to get products into projects. The Transparency Catalog™, the leading source of building and construction products for high-performance, low-carbon, healthier buildings, makes it easy for industry professionals to collaboratively select, specify, and procure products – and reward building product manufacturers for making them.

ICC-ES, in turn, contributes decades of building code expertise, code official approval and trust, and independent conformity assessment processes that assess building product code compliance and safety. Because of ICC-ES's reach to thousands of authorities having jurisdiction (AHJs) across North America and globally, Transparency Catalog visibility and use is intended to increase exponentially, rewarding manufacturers who have invested in product transparency (EPDs, material health disclosures and low-emitting certifications) by having their products sourced and added to many more projects.

“The awareness and demand for high-performance building materials has been accelerating with the recognition of the built environment's impacts on human health and the natural environment. Building stakeholders need to be able to account for embodied carbon emissions, improved material health, reuse and waste reduction, resiliency and safety.” said Terry Swack, founder and CEO of Sustainable Minds. “By combining Sustainable Minds’ product transparency solutions with ICC-ES’s technical expertise and international reach to building officials, we will help the industry more reliably get high-performance products into projects.”

“Manufacturers are increasingly looking for ways to demonstrate both environmental performance and compliance with building codes,” said David Tompos, executive vice president of ICC’s Conformity Assessment Group. “By pairing ICC-ES’s trusted product evaluations with Sustainable Minds’ PCR / LCA / EPD expertise and digital solutions, we are helping manufacturers position their products for confident specification, while reinforcing safety as a core component of high performance.”

To learn more and get involved:

  • Register for the Sustainable Minds ICC-ES Partnership webinar, with David Tompos and Terry Swack, November 18, 2:00 p.m. ET.