Case Study: Legrand and an Evolving Building Design Landscape

An Evolving Building Design Landscape: A Case Study on Sustainability and Transparency

What may appear to be a simple question at first glance represents a fundamental shift in the building industry, where architects, designers, engineers and others are increasingly seeking detailed material health and environmental impact data on the products they specify. This growth in demand has been driven in part by green building rating systems such as LEED, WELL, and the Living Building Challenge and amplified by the insights we've gained in recent years regarding the impacts of buildings on climate and human health. Alongside this market demand, the landscape of environmental product regulations has also expanded to encompass a growing number of product categories and substances of concern.

The Growing Demand for Material Health and Environmental Impact Data

In response to these growing demands and armed with the knowledge that collaboration will be an essential ingredient in accelerating progress towards a more sustainable built environment, leading manufacturers and members of the Architect and Design community have formed the Living Product 50 (LP50) and Materials Pledge, respectively. Both groups are committed to product transparency and optimizing products, and to engaging with each other to grow the movement.

As an LP50 Leader, Legrand is actively investing in the development of transparency documentation and products that meet market demands for material health. Legrand turned to 3E Exchange as a key partner to accelerate these efforts.

Legrand's Partnership with 3E Exchange

Legrand is a global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures, offering solutions for use in commercial, industrial, and residential buildings. Legrand manufactures products across a broad spectrum of product categories, including wiring devices, architectural lighting, data center solutions, AV equipment, and building control systems. To date, Legrand has published over 145 Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), over 15 Health Product Declarations (HPDs), and has removed the ten substances covered by the EU's RoHS Directive from a majority of its products, regardless of where in the world they are sold.

3E Exchange is an industry-leading technology platform that provides product manufacturers with an integrated software solution to manage supplier data collection, product compliance documentation, design guidance and customer facing reports.

Since day one of the partnership, 3E Exchange has enabled Legrand to more effectively and efficiently respond to its customer demands, and to extract insights from data that was previously found only in disparate software systems. Patrick Ford, Legrand's Product Sustainability Manager, found that

“3E Exchange was able to fill a gap that no one else was able to fill.”

Accelerating Health Product Declaration (HPD) Development

Legrand is committed to providing product transparency in the form of Health Product Declarations (HPDs). 3E Exchange provides a central location to aggregate supply chain data collected for materials and components, down to the chemical substance level. While Legrand products are comprised of a diverse set of materials, there is oftentimes an overlap in the materials used across product categories, like standard metals and some polymers. These common materials are stored on 3E Exchange, in a Legrand specific “Common Materials Library” where in-house HPD developers can access the information and reduce the number of inquiries sent to the same supplier.

Once that data is aggregated for a specific product, 3E Exchange makes the HPD creation process user friendly and intuitive. One example of this is the 3E Exchange auto-calculation feature, which clearly displays which substances in the product are above the selected disclosure threshold. Prior to 3E Exchange, this was a manual and iterative process each time an HPD was to be published.

Streamlining Customer Responses with 3E Exchange

Like many other product manufacturers, Legrand has a due diligence process in place for ensuring that the chemical substances used in manufacturing meet all applicable regulations. Prior to using 3E Exchange, that process could only be completed at the site level, meaning that company-wide assessments required sustainability team members to manually screen Safety Data Sheets across multiple manufacturing sites. When this manual process was mentioned to the team, 3E Exchange offered a solution – the newly created SDS mass upload tool. Legrand was able to upload hundreds of Safety Data Sheets at a time, catalog these files according to site and supplier, and screen the substances against current and future regulatory lists to determine compliance status and what future actions may be required. This saved the Legrand sustainability team several days' worth of work that they could then allocate to developing transparency documentation and driving eco-design efforts.

In addition to the hours saved, the data was also now aggregated in one central location and available for future screenings and risk assessments. For example, if there is a new substance added to the Living Building Challenge Red List or a product content regulation, Legrand can search all of the SDS at once, in addition to the HPDs and other materials data in the system, to determine if the substance may be present in any of its products.

The benefit of using 3E Exchange to pull together supply chain data is extending beyond transparency reporting for Legrand. If a question comes up about a product or material in 3E Exchange, the record can be immediately accessed and screened against the customer's request. Questions about compliance to a customer or building rating system restricted substance list (RSL), industry standard, or regulation can be answered in a matter of minutes rather than over the course of several hours or even several days. Legrand has become a preferred sustainability partner to its customers by being able to quickly respond to these requests.

Meeting the Demands of Tomorrow

3E Exchange is supporting Legrand and the ongoing LP50 initiative to allow suppliers to proactively report transparency and compliance information. Using the 3E Exchange Shared Materials platform Legrand suppliers can share their disclosures with multiple customers, saving them time reporting. Likewise, Legrand can find supplier information that has already been published, saving them time surveying suppliers. Reducing the time spent on communication in the supply chains allows all parties to meet customer requests more quickly and spend more time on product innovation.

As the trusted solution to provide best in class product transparency and supply chain data management to its clients, 3E Exchange has remained focused on rapidly expanding into new areas to help Legrand capture increasing value over time. This has been vital to the success of the partnership, allowing Legrand to not only plan for, but also to act on evolving industry and regulatory demands. 3E Exchange has been able to maximize value to Legrand by ensuring the flexibility to add features and capabilities that save the Legrand team and other customers significant time and effort.