Life-cycle assessment, environmental product declarations, and corporate social responsibility reporting are a strong start for the building industry, but they leave a basic question open: what is in the product, and what does it do to human health? The health product declaration, or HPD, is an open standard built to answer that question. It is a voluntary format for reporting building product ingredients and the health hazards associated with them. Health touches construction twice, in the workforce health programs that protect people on the job site and in the materials that end up inside the finished building, and HPDs give both groups a common language for talking about ingredients.
The Rise of Product Transparency
Manufacturers have spent years publishing environmental data through life-cycle assessments and EPDs, and corporate social responsibility reports describe company-level commitments. The movement has real limits: an EPD quantifies environmental impacts such as global warming potential, but it does not inventory the chemicals in the product.
Transparency is spreading across the whole supply chain. The same push for disclosure shows up in the media that covers the industry, where disclosure practices in construction and tool media product reviews set expectations for what a review must reveal about a product.
What EPDs Do Not Cover
An EPD reports environmental performance derived from a life-cycle assessment. It describes impacts per functional unit, from raw material extraction to end of life. It does not list ingredients, and it does not screen those ingredients against health hazard lists. Two products with identical environmental footprints can differ sharply in the hazards they present to installers and occupants.
Several forces are pushing ingredient disclosure forward:
- LEED v4 material credits that reward ingredient disclosure
- Customer requirements from owners and design firms
- Red lists and restricted substance programs from large buyers
- Regulatory attention to chemicals of concern in building products
- Manufacturer interest in differentiating healthy products
The HPD builds on earlier disclosure work. Material safety data sheets have long reported hazards, but they are written for industrial handling, vary by supplier, and rarely cover finished product formulations in a comparable way. The HPD reorganizes that information around the building product itself, with a consistent structure from one manufacturer to the next.
Inside a Health Product Declaration
The HPD format is built around a product inventory. The manufacturer names every ingredient, gives its percentage by weight, and screens each one against authoritative hazard lists. The result is a document a specifier can read quickly and compare across products.
| HPD section | What it reports |
|---|---|
| Product identification | Name, manufacturer, and product description |
| Ingredient inventory | Each ingredient with CAS number and percent weight |
| Hazard screening | Ingredients matched against priority hazard lists |
| Associated hazards | Exposure routes and handling precautions |
| Certifications and compliance | Third-party labels and regulatory status |
The format works for real products. Window and door manufacturers have published environmental product declarations and health product declarations for their core products, proving that the disclosure process is practical for complex assemblies with hundreds of components.
Hazard Screening
Screening is the core of the HPD. Each ingredient is checked against lists maintained by research and regulatory bodies, covering carcinogens, reproductive toxins, respiratory sensitizers, and other hazard classes. The declaration reports where the product falls without requiring the manufacturer to perform new toxicity testing.
Priority Hazard Lists
Authoritative lists anchor the screening. They include chemicals identified by major public health and regulatory programs, and the HPD format references them by name so that two declarations can be compared on the same basis. When an ingredient appears on a list, the declaration flags the hazard rather than hiding it.
Completing a declaration follows a defined sequence:
- Inventory every ingredient above the reporting threshold
- Assign CAS numbers and percent weights
- Screen each ingredient against the priority hazard lists
- Identify associated hazards and exposure routes
- Document certifications and compliance claims
- Publish the declaration and update it when the formula changes
Manufacturers occasionally face a genuine tension between disclosure and proprietary formulas. The HPD format handles the conflict with thresholds and ranges rather than silence: ingredients below a reporting threshold are grouped, and formulations can report percent ranges instead of exact figures. The result keeps trade secrets intact while giving specifiers the information they need.
From Pilot Programs to Everyday Specification
The HPD standard matured through a 60-day pilot project in which thirty leading building product manufacturers completed draft declarations for selected products. A volunteer working group of designers, specifiers, and building owner-operators guided the testing, and the exercise started when a global manufacturer of doors, locks, and security systems volunteered to use the draft format on its own products. Three more firms quickly joined, and the working group used the results to refine the format before public release.
How the Pilot Worked
Each pilot participant received the draft format and a deadline. The manufacturers worked through the inventory and screening steps on real products, and the working group collected the friction points: unclear thresholds, missing list references, and products with hundreds of ingredients. Those findings became the revisions that made the standard usable at scale.
The 60-day window was deliberately short. A compressed schedule forced the working group to confront real obstacles immediately, from products with hundreds of ingredients to supply chains where the manufacturer does not know every component. The pilot tested the document and the process at the same time, which is why the revisions that came out of it were specific rather than theoretical.
Declarations only help if they reach the people choosing products. Digital product catalogs for building material dealers show why product data quality drives B2B sales, and HPD data slots into the same channel: specifiers pull the declaration from the catalog at the moment of decision.
The standard serves four groups:
- Designers comparing products on an even basis
- Specifiers writing health requirements into project documents
- Owners tracking restricted substances across their portfolios
- Manufacturers with a credible format for healthy products
Rating programs that reward material transparency give projects credit for submitting HPDs. That turns a voluntary disclosure into a measurable project outcome and gives manufacturers a business reason to complete the paperwork.
HPDs Compared with Environmental Product Declarations
HPDs and EPDs answer different questions and work best as a pair. The EPD describes environmental impacts across the product life cycle, while the HPD describes what is in the product and which ingredients carry health hazards. A specification that asks for both gets the complete picture.
| Question | EPD answers | HPD answers |
|---|---|---|
| What is the footprint? | Life-cycle environmental impacts | Not covered |
| What is in the product? | Not covered | Full ingredient inventory |
| Are ingredients hazardous? | Not covered | Screened against hazard lists |
| How is it verified? | Third-party LCA review | Declaration plus review |
The two documents also differ in how they age. An EPD is tied to a specific life-cycle assessment and a product category rule, so it is updated when the assessment changes. An HPD changes whenever the formulation changes, which means manufacturers who substitute ingredients must refresh the declaration to keep it accurate.
Reading an EPD takes practice, and the format is familiar in many product categories. An environmental product declaration for MDF and other wood panels explains what the document reveals about a common building material, from feedstock to manufacturing emissions.
Reading Both Documents Together
A sensible review sequence starts with the EPD for environmental performance and then checks the HPD for ingredient hazards. Products with similar EPD results can differ on health, and the HPD is the document that exposes the difference. Neither format replaces the other.
Using Health Data in Real Buildings
The payoff comes in the specification. Owners can require HPDs for interior finishes, insulation, adhesives, and other products that sit close to occupants. Design teams evaluate the hazard screens during material selection and ask for alternatives when a product carries an avoidable flag.
Materials interact with the building systems around them. Open space requirements for ventilation in buildings show that air quality depends on the whole design, and the HPD tells the same story from the product side: a low-emitting material in a well-ventilated space performs better than either one alone.
Specifying for Health
Health-oriented specifications share a common shape. They name the required declarations, set thresholds for acceptable hazard screens, and build in a review step so the design team can substitute products before construction rather than after.
Retrofit and renovation projects benefit as much as new construction. When an existing building is renovated, the specification can require HPDs for the new finishes, insulation, and adhesives, and the project team can compare the proposed products with the ones being removed. Across a portfolio of buildings, that discipline shifts purchasing toward healthier products without waiting for a code change.
The evidence base keeps growing as more products publish ingredient data, and the connection between health impacts of building materials and building outcomes is documented across dozens of product categories. Every new HPD makes the next comparison easier, and the standard moves from pilot novelty to routine expectation.