TOTO Is the First Plumbing Manufacturer to Validate Its Products’ Environmental Performance with New Sustainable Minds’ Transparency Reports.

TOTO announced today that it is introducing an innovative, new way to report product transparency that enables customers to earn LEED v4 credit for select high-efficiency toilets. Committed to environmental leadership that exceeds compliance; TOTO discovered that it was unable to comply with LEED v4’s disclosure option to provide Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for its high-efficiency toilets. The company could not do this because there is no Product Category Rule for toilets (PCRs define the requirements of EPDs for each product category). EPDs are required for its building industry customers to earn the highest number of LEED points for purchasing TOTO products. To solve this problem, TOTO, already using Sustainable Minds’ LCA software to help it design sustainable products, turned to the company to help it solve this problem marketing. Together, TOTO and Sustainable Minds discovered that current EPDs generally provide too much life cycle analysis and other environmental data, making their length and level of technicality difficult to understand for a non-technical reader. In addition, few include much-needed product marketing information to put the environmental information in context. In short, today’s EPD’s make it difficult for architects, builders, contractors, and other members of the building industry to compare plumbing products and make well-informed greener purchasing decisions. As remedy, TOTO and Sustainable Minds saw an opportunity to use the life cycle assessments TOTO does on its products to develop a transparent reporting tool that is effective, credible, comparable, and affordable. The new SM Transparency Reports are concise, compelling and effective. They present functional and environmental product performance information together in a three-page report, enabling a manufacturer like TOTO to make its LCA results understandable by describing what the company is doing to make its products more sustainable. The new SM Transparency Reports give readers visibility into the decisions TOTO makes across the life cycle of its products. The balance of the story is contained in the attached news release. High-resolution digital images and examples of TOTO’s new SM Transparency Reports are immediately available upon request. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like additional information.