If you make valves, piping, cable, conduit or noise barriers, data centers are probably the fastest-growing part of your pipeline. They are also becoming one of the most demanding customers for sustainability proof. Data center owners are asking their suppliers for third-party verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). The suppliers who can hand one over across their whole product line, not just a single flagship SKU, are the ones who stay on the spec.

This post covers why the ask is coming, what kind of proof actually holds up, and how manufacturers with large product families can get there without commissioning a separate study for every product.

Why Are Data Center Owners Asking Suppliers for EPDs?

In July 2024, the governing members of the iMasons Climate Accord, including AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Schneider Electric, published an open letter. It asked every supplier serving data centers to adopt EPDs and disclose the life cycle emissions of their products (ESG Dive). The letter asks for verified EPDs that are shared in common third-party databases, so buyers can compare products without chasing each supplier for a spreadsheet.

The reason is Scope 3. For the companies building data centers, the emissions embodied in construction materials and equipment sit in their supply chain. They can only measure, report and reduce those emissions with product-level data from suppliers. A verified EPD is the standard format for that data, and databases such as Building Transparency's EC3 are where specifiers go looking for it.

What an EPD is: an Environmental Product Declaration is a standardized, third-party verified report of a product's environmental impacts across its life cycle, prepared under ISO 14025 and a Product Category Rule (PCR) for that type of product. It is the public result of a life cycle assessment (LCA), not the LCA itself.

The pressure doesn't stop at concrete and steel. Data centers are built from MEP systems and site infrastructure: chilled water piping and valves, kilometers of cable and cable tray, conduit, and the acoustic barriers that help projects get through permitting. Every one of those is a product category a buyer will eventually want data for.

Why One EPD Is Not Enough for Data Center Suppliers

Most first EPD projects are scoped around one product. That works when you sell one product. It breaks down for the manufacturers who actually supply data centers, because their catalogs are built on product families.

• A valve line comes in dozens of sizes and materials. Each one uses a different amount of bronze, brass or stainless steel, so each has a different footprint.

• Cable and conduit ship in many gauges, ratings and lengths.

• An acoustic wall is configured to every site: height, length, panel type and transport distance all change the result.

A buyer comparing options on a project needs the data for the configuration they are specifying, not the one you happened to declare. If your EPD covers one size of one series, you have proof for a small slice of what you sell. Commissioning a new study for every product family is slow and expensive, and it leaves you maintaining a stack of disconnected reports that drift out of date.

The PCR adds a second constraint. A single EPD can only cover products whose impacts are close enough to each other. Configurations that differ materially need their own declarations or a clearly stated exclusion. So "one EPD for the whole catalog" isn't the answer either. What you need is a way to produce defensible results for every configuration you sell.

What Sustainability Proof Actually Holds Up on a Data Center Project

Proof that wins a spec has three properties.

1. It is third-party verified. A verifier has checked the underlying model against the PCR. Accuracy comes from that review, not from the manufacturer's own claim, and it is what lets a buyer trust the number without auditing you.

2. It covers what the buyer is actually buying. Results exist for the sizes, materials and configurations on the project, or a published scaling method lets the buyer derive them.

3. It is findable. It is published through a program operator and visible in the databases specifiers use, so it shows up when someone checks.

The common thread is the model behind the EPD. If that model is built once, structured around how your plants actually make the product, and parameterized by size and material, every new configuration is a change of inputs rather than a new project.

How One Model Can Cover a Whole Product Line

This is the approach we take at CarbonGraph, and it is the reason our work has moved toward data center suppliers.

Instead of one LCA per product, we build a single parameterized model of the product family. It is structured the way the factory works:

• Raw materials: the materials and their transport, including recycled content.

• Manufacturing: foundry, machining or forming steps, with the energy, consumables and waste behind each kilogram of output.

• Final product: where those pieces come together, driven by parameters like size, material and configuration.

Change the size, and component weights update and the manufacturing impacts scale with them. Change a material, and the results follow. The model is aligned to the PCR before data goes in, so it is ready for verification as it is built. Every assumption is documented where the verifier can see it.

That same model is what lets one EPD cover more of the catalog. Where the PCR allows a group of products under one declaration, the EPD can publish results for a representative product plus scaling factors, usually tied to mass or size, so a specifier can calculate the result for the exact configuration on their project. The model generates those factors from the same verified structure, and it flags any configuration that falls outside what one declaration can honestly cover.

CarbonGraph's demo press gate valve model, built from public data. Picking a size swaps in the parameters that drive the result.

In practice: for one North American valve manufacturer, a single model now covers five product families across their full size ranges. It also caught a configuration option whose impact was too different from the standard product to sit under the same declaration, which is exactly the kind of issue that would otherwise surface late in verification.

RMP Global, a recycled-plastic noise wall manufacturer that has bid on multiple data center projects, took the same route. Its model lets it produce results for different wall configurations without rebuilding the study (case study).

The result is speed where it matters. Once the model exists, adding a product family, answering a buyer's question about a specific configuration, or updating results when a supplier or process changes is a change to inputs, not a new consulting project.

A Better Way to Prove Your Sustainability Advantage to Data Center Buyers

CarbonGraph is a next-generation LCA platform that helps manufacturers move from product data to verified environmental disclosures in a single, structured workflow. We build PCR-aligned models of whole product families and work alongside the verifier and program operator. The same model keeps serving you after the first EPD is published.

If a data center project is asking for your EPD, the useful question isn't "can we get one EPD done?" but "can we prove the advantage of everything we sell into this market?" That's a modeling problem, and it's solvable.

Ready to see how it would work for your products? Book a walkthrough and we'll show you how we'd model your product family.