Company News: Kilsaran Publish Environmental Product Declarations 

As Ireland’s leading independent supplier of heavy building materials, Kilsaran aims to make sustainable production practices a priority. The construction industry is experiencing a paradigm shift in which Green Building is becoming increasingly important as awareness increases on how sustainable practices can positively impact the environment.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (2007), the construction industry has the greatest opportunity to affect environmental issues due to the built environment’s major share in energy consumption and contribution to global warming. 

At Kilsaran, we recently joined in this movement by publishing Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for some of our key products. Environmental Product Declarations (EPD’s) provide independent verification of a product’s environmental impact across a range of different parameters, from global warming potential to eutrophication, acidification, ozone depletion, and natural resource depletion. 

We published our first two EPDs earlier this year. This first EPD was for our range of paving products consisting of Newgrange 80mm silver granite, Clima Pave 60mm Curragh Gold, and Corrib 60mm black granite. The second EPD was for Masonry Mortar. 

These are two of the first EPDs on the Irish market for heavy construction products and we at Kilsaran are delighted to be one of the first companies to take a step forward in this area.

“(The EPD) allows the purchaser to specifically examine the performance and impact of similar products in an accurate way”, says Group Technical Manager and Head of Sustainability, Keith Goodwin. “This journey for Kilsaran allowed us to clearly see which materials and production processes have the greatest environmental impact and to review and adjust where necessary, as well as look at alternative supply chains to improve the performance of our products”.

The move to publish EPDs is just one aspect of Kilsaran’s journey to transform from ‘Grey to Green’.