LATICRETE Partners With ecoScorecard.com
Words: Dan KamysLATICRETE, a manufacturer of construction solutions for the building industry, is now part of ecoScorecard, a database of free, web-based, manufacturer-specific micro sites that help architects and designers search, evaluate and document environmental impacts of building products and materials against an environmental system.
“We decided to partner with ecoScorecard as their system has some features and benefits that our current LEED Project Certification Assistant program could not offer,” said Sean Boyle, LATICRETE director of marketing and product management. “Our customers can save time and money with ecoScorecard as it is able to calculate cost-savings on a LEED project, something that our system cannot.”
LATICRETE currently has 50 LEED-related products on the ecoScorecard website according to Mitch Hawkins, technical services manager at LATICRETE: “A great deal of the LEED process is based on calculations. How much a product costs, and the value of each product as it is compared to the total cost, how much recycled content is there, and what is the cost of that in relation to the total cost. So, as you can see, there is indeed a lot of calculations.
With ecoScorecard, a customer fills in the products they are purchasing and the price, whether they are using LEED 2009 or the new LEED version 4, they will be credited the appropriate credits or points depending upon the system they chose. The order is then broken down by each specific product, and based upon the calculations how much it costs, value of the product amount of recycled materials, the LEED credit is determined.”
The new partnership with ecoScorecard is in addition to the company’s current in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Project Certification Assistant program the company offers on its website, laticrete.com.
“When using our current LEED Project Certification Assistant system, we can’t calculate cost because we can’t enter the price the customer paid someone else has to take all our information and do all the calculations for them,” said Hawkins. “Instead of going through the time and trouble of gathering all the information and doing all the calculations, all they have to do id download the pdf and turn that into the LEED association professional and it is done. This system does all the calculations for them and makes their life much, much easier.”
Hawkins also set up direct links within the ecoScorecard program to general LATICRETE GREENGUARD certificates, and health product declarations as well. “This is a service that we proved and in our industry, if you can save an architectural firm time, effort and money he is going to use you,” said Hawkins. “That is why we have other tools like our architectural guidebook that writes specifications for them, they don’t have to hire someone or have a person on staff do this. They have the entire specifications after a few clicks of the mouse.”