By Healthcare Facilities Today

Valley Forge, Pa. – Strengthening its commitment to product transparency and to creating healthy interior environments, CertainTeed Ceilings has issued the industry’s first Health Product Declarations. The HPDs offer detailed information on the makeup of the vast majority (24) of the company's ceiling product families and their potential health and environmental impacts, helping architects and designers make fully informed decisions when specifying products. The HPDs will also contribute to important materials and resources credits under the newest version of LEED, which places greater emphasis on product transparency.

The HPDs were issued in alliance with the HPD Collaborative, a customer-led organization committed to the continuous improvement of the building industry’s environmental and health performance, through transparency and innovation in the building product supply chain. The HPD is an open standard that establishes a common reporting language for disclosing information about the ingredients used to construct a building product and their associated health information.

"With the introduction of LEED v4, it is more important than ever to provide our customers with complete, transparent information not only on the environmental impact of our products and how they are made, but for the individual 'ingredients' in each product and their potential health impacts," said Dawn Chittick, director of marketing for CertainTeed Ceilings. "HPDs establish a common language through which CertainTeed and other building product manufacturers can communicate this information, which maximizes disclosure and ensures accurate and consistent reporting."

The HPDs join CertainTeed’s industry-leading library of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), which have been certified by UL Environment and cover fiberglass Sustainable Insulation® and over 20 ceiling product families. While HPDs evaluate the chemical and material makeup of a product, EPDs provide third-party verification of environmental life cycle data, including a product’s production process impact, usage of raw materials and recycled content, packaging, health aspects and end of life impact.

For more information on CertainTeed’s library of EPDs and HPDs, go to www.certainteed.com/Ceilings/Sustainability/EPDs-LCA.

As experts in the science of sound, CertainTeed Ceilings serves as a single source for high-quality ceilings that create acoustically friendly, aesthetically captivating environments. Encompassing the Performa®, Ecophon® and Gyptone® brands along with Decoustics® — a leader in high-precision, custom-engineered solutions — the company offers the perfect balance of innovation, budget and beauty with products that range from basic high-performance panels to premium, customizable systems. Through its Environmental Acoustics™ design and research, CertainTeed Ceilings provides solutions that promote healthier interiors while having a smaller impact on the environment. The company offers ceiling panels with one of the highest concentrations of recycled content in the industry as well as a recycling program for used ceiling panels. For more information, visit www.certainteed.com/ceilings.

About CertainTeed

Through the responsible development of innovative and sustainable building products, CertainTeed, headquartered in Valley Forge, Pa., has helped shape the building products industry for more than 100 years. Founded in 1904 as General Roofing Manufacturing Company, the firm's slogan "Quality Made Certain, Satisfaction Guaranteed," quickly inspired the name CertainTeed. Today, CertainTeed® is North America’s leading brand of exterior and interior building products, including roofing, siding, fence, decking, railing, trim, insulation, gypsum and ceilings.

A subsidiary of Saint-Gobain, the world’s largest building products company, CertainTeed and its affiliates have more than 5,700 employees and more than 60 manufacturing facilities throughout the United States and Canada. For five consecutive years, the company has received top honors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for its contributions in protecting the environment and was most recently the recipient of the 2013 ENERGY STAR Sustained Excellence Award. The group had total sales of approximately $3.3 billion in 2012. www.certainteed.com