The EPD projects achieved by Esalex in the building materials sector highlights the importance of impacts from suppliers, for which new engagement systems should be identified.

Esalex is committed to the promotion of product/service eco-innovation and the LCA study has become the main tool to pursue this goal.
In recent years many activities have been focused on the construction sector: in 2021 we have developed several EPDs, referring to many products with customers operating at international level such as EUROSTANDARD (products for aqueducts), ISCOM (metal roofing for buildings), ITALGRANITI (tiles for interiors and exteriors).
In all these cases, the weight of the impact is 94-98% in charge of phases A1-A3 of EN 15804, i.e. the major impacts are due to the raw material production phases (upstream) and to the production phase (core).
Considering that companies are often already very advanced and further improvements in the core phase are extremely costly, it follows that the “best step” is to involve suppliers of raw materials, which in reality have participated little in the project, not having the ability to respond promptly to the request for primary site-specific data.
We evaluated several hypotheses to facilitate this:
1. Ability to tell and explain the EPD to the supplier.
2. Involving the supplier in your goal and business.
3. Help the supplier identify their critical points.