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MFRs: Find out about the value of adding your products.
AECOs: Schedule an educational demo for your team.
Architects, engineers & contractors (AECs):
Do more in 1 click.
We’re making it super easy to find & specify greener and healthier products for your high-performance building projects — and reward manufacturers for making them.
Use the Transparency Catalog to find brands and products for your green building projects in minutes – and you’ll never again have to:
- Spend weeks or months researching to find and specify products with transparency disclosures
- Hunt for products and then separately hunt for their transparency disclosures to put together a green building rating system submittal package
- Waste lots of time checking construction submittals to determine if products are equal to those in the spec
Now in seconds, you can do things you couldn’t do at all before.
Powerful MasterFormat® filtering, aligned with MasterSpec®, provides the flexibility to find exactly the brands, products and transparency disclosures to meet your requirements in each division AND section.
- Find EVERY building product MFR in N. America investing in product transparency, from EVERY material ingredient disclosure program and EVERY EPD program operator in N. America – on one page.
- Find EVERY EPD for products used in N. America – in one place.
- Select the brands you want to see to learn about their products, ones you know and others that are new to you. Go directly to the product pages on their web sites to get all the information they provide.
- Filter results further by your choice of green building rating system product transparency credits.
Connect product selection with specification.
Now it’s easy to find 3 MFRs per section, with equivalent products and transparency disclosures.
- Update your office masters – Go through every section and select MFRs, their specific products and specific disclosures to establish the basis of design.
- Compare products and disclosures side by side – Each click opens the page in a new tab.
The Transparency Catalog is always free to use, no login, no ads and we will never sell data or analytics.
It doesn’t get easier than this.
Why the Transparency Catalog only includes products with transparency disclosures?
MFRs investing in product transparency are committing to significant costs, time and risks to understand the materials and processes across the product life cycle, interpret the outcomes and convey the results. Most products with transparency disclosures already have certifications created for earlier versions of green building rating systems, which you can find on the MFR’s web site.
Our goal is to help you reward MFRs who are moving forward with the work required to make credibly greener and healthier products.
Building product manufacturers:
Do more in 1 click.
AECs aren’t looking just for disclosures, they’re looking for your greener and healthier products with disclosures. We’re making it super easy for AECs to find & specify yours.
Use the Transparency Catalog to make your product transparency investments pay off – and your reps & distributors will never again have to:
- Hunt to find all your products with transparency disclosures – from one or all of your brands; then figure out which disclosures go with which products
- Create custom training and sales tools to educate AECs and get your brand and products into the spec
- Spend hours emailing around PDFs of disclosures, responding to inbound requests
Now in seconds, you can do things you couldn’t do at all before.
Designed by customer experience and product transparency experts, your Transparency Catalog listing delivers the best user experience throughout the construction process, from design to build.
- See ALL your products, with all the associated disclosures, organized by MasterFormat® division and section – on one page. Products link to product pages on your web site, where you want AECs to go.
- Do great demos online, at lunch & learns and on a tablet on-site. MasterFormat filtering, aligned with MasterSpec® sections, lets AECs find your products and disclosures for a project, office master and submittals.
- Instantly send a customized email with the link to your listing for AECs to find and download what they need, when they need it. They can do the same to share your brand with project teams and clients.
SM Transparency Products help MFRs tell their product transparency stories in a way that traditional database solutions cannot.
Featured Brands use our next-generation cloud reporting tools, SM Transparency Products.
- Integrate product transparency into product marketing and provide everything needed to make an informed decision, all in one place, delivered in your Featured Brand Showroom.
- Make the disclosure data understandable AND meaningful by providing your explanation and improvement stories that disclosures don’t report.
AECs require consistent, understandable and meaningful information to make decisions.
Product transparency builds credibly greener and healthier brands – but not by just producing disclosures. The value for MFRs comes from demonstrating you understand what it means and know what you’re doing.
Truth builds trust, trust builds powerful brands and powerful brands create preference and value for their companies.
Listing types – Filtered results display brands in this descending order:
Level 3: Featured brand
Makes your products with transparency information findable and the transparency information understandable
- Graphic in Featured brand zone on front page links to your Brand Showroom
- Showroom display is organized by product groups and MasterFormat® number
- Products images link to Sustainable Minds' innovative reporting tools, the SM Transparency Report (our brand of EPD), Material Health Overviews and Performance Fact Sheets to integrated product transparency with product marketing to make disclosures more understandable and meaningful for non-technical readers. They provide the value-add of integrated explanation and improvement stories that disclosures don’t report.
Contact us to learn how to become a Featured Brand
Level 2: Standard (example on left)
Makes it easy to find all your products with transparency info in 1 page
- Manufacturer name links to its website front page
- List of products linking to web site product pages
- Links to associated disclosures with key attributes & expiration dates
- Custom introduction text and contact link to manufacturer
- Add your own Google Analytics tracking code
- Customized social media icons
Level 1: FREE
These manufacturers have products with transparency disclosures, but you'll have to visit the MFR’s web site to find the products and disclosures.
Use the links on the page to contact the MFR and/or Sustainable Minds about a Standard subscription.
Two types of free listings:
- MFR has EPDs for products. They may also have material disclosures.
- MFR has material disclosures only.
Designing and marketing greener & healthier products is a continuous improvement loop.
Sustainable Minds donates a portion of the Transparency Catalog proceeds to the National Park Foundation.
The intent of product transparency is first to provide insights into the environmental and/or human health impacts created over the lifecycle of products.
Manufacturers who understand what’s causing the impacts can make better design decisions to make better, higher performing, more innovative products. These manufacturers have real stories to tell. Sharing this knowledge educates the industry and ultimately creates preference and value for that brand.
Since the announcement of LEED v4, Sustainable Minds has been a proponent and driving force behind making product transparency information simple, understandable and meaningful.
Doing that has meant taking the long view and a systems approach starting with evaluating the standards development process and the various rating systems to understand commonalities and differences. Then working to make the resulting information from these programs simpler.
Sustainable Minds became an ISO 14025 program operator to develop a standardized, simpler and more useful approach to creating product category rules (PCRs) and environmental product declarations (EPDs). This vision has driven change and alignment in the industry.
The SM Transparency Catalog is the next level of effort to bring together all those manufacturers making the commitment to be transparent and to present that information in a simple, standardized and consistent way.
What the market wants and needs is products with actually better environmental performance, not just reports. Disclosure alone without improvement is not helpful. We want AEC decision-makers to understand, make informed decisions and reward manufacturers who are actually making greener & healthier products.
Creating preference for those products by educating the market to understand what product transparency information means – will drive behavior change.
Everyone benefits:
- Manufacturers: Leverage transparency investments to create better products
- AEC decision-makers: Easier overall – credible info they want and understand to reward manufacturers
- Green building rating systems: More products to award points to decision-makers for making greener purchase decisions thereby building more actually greener buildings
We're making it super easy to find, specify and procure greener and healthier products for high performance building projects — and reward manufacturers for making them.
Contact us
Welcome to the Transparency Catalog!
Check your email for the link to confirm your email address and get started using your new Transparency Catalog account!
Welcome to the Transparency Catalog!
You can now get started using the Transparency Catalog, the leading building & construction products platform for high performance, low embodied carbon buildings.