CalStar Publishes EPD for Fly Ash Brick

CalStar Products makes brick with a proprietary manufacturing process and a binder of fly ash.  By using fly ash, the company diverts waste from the landfill (37% recycled content) and eliminates energy-intensive firing — these bricks are cured overnight at temperatures below 200° F, according to CalStar.  To give the market comfort with their sustainability claims, CalStar obtained a lifecycle analysis (LCA) from Perkins + Will and published the results in an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).

It turns out cradle-to-gate (raw material extraction/transportation and manufacturing) CO2 emissions for a single CalStar brick is 0.13 pounds, compared to 0.81 for a single clay brick.  Cradle-to-gate embodied energy is 1,203 BTU of energy for the CalStar brick versus 6,251 BTU of energy for a traditional clay-fired brick.

In other words, that’s 81% less manufacturing energy and an 84% smaller carbon footprint delivered with the CalStar fly ash brick.  The CalStar brick is available in modular and utility sizing and a palette of earth tones.

Perkins + Will finished the LCA using data sets from GaBi 5.0 software, while the Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability verified the EPD under the SMaRT Certified rating system, according to a CalStar press release.

[+] More about the LCA and EPD for CalStar bricks.