Evaluating the comparability of environmental product declarations for use as a decision-making tool for building designers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With its inclusion to LEED®, use of EPDs in the construction industry will accelerate over time. This research examines current practices surrounding the use of EPDs in construction and addresses a key need arising from a case study completed on the first Canadian project to use EPDs. Findings suggest that lack of comparability between claims hinders the ability for them to be used as true, decisive comparative tools on projects. This informed the development of a semi-automated comparison tool for EPDs and PCRs. Three separate construction product categories were chosen for comparison to develop this tool: insulation, flooring, and cladding systems. Comparability was more evident in categories that have had early involvement in publishing environmental claims (such as flooring, because of its human health implications). However, there was concerning evidence regarding the comparability of EPDs that were comparable according to international standards were incomparable according to the comparison framework developed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.248 | 0.549 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".