Using Blue Marble to produce EPDs for balustrade systems

If you’d rather read the video transcript, you can find it below.

Who are Q-railing, and what is your role in the team?

My name is Darryl Holloway. I’m the Architectural Sales Manager for Q-railing UK and Ireland. Q-railing are pretty much the market leaders in balustrade system providers and components. We’ve been around in the UK for 20 years, in fact it’s our 20th year anniversary this year in the UK. And we supply to end users, right the way up to tier one main contractors. Covering small residential jobs right up to 3,000 meter multiple balustrade systems.

How did you discover you had a need for Environmental Product Declarations, for your balustrades and railing systems?

I predominantly interact with tier one main contractors and architectural practices, across the country. Construction has had a large problem with its impact it has on the environment for many years, and it’s only been the last few years that it’s really woken up and decided it needs to do something about it.

And when you are engaging with main contractors, it has now become an absolute necessity that you can prove the impact of your products and systems on the environment and essentially the building that they have to provide to their client. So, it’s been probably the last couple of years that they’ve been asking for them. And we’ve been on a path to get them.

What solution were Blue Marble able to offer, to efficiently provide EPDs for your balustrades?

Traditionally, before we moved into large project work, we were predominantly a component supplier. So we have 5,500 different products. Even before we engaged Blue Marble (with their knowledge of what they can bring) we knew that having EPDs for 5,000 products was probably going to be unobtainable. Both practically and probably commercially. What Blue Marble then suggested (which we didn’t know of at the time) was to group products into systems. We already sold them in systems to the main contractors, so that worked out. We were able to group five of our main systems so that they could do average EPDs.

There’s a little bit of work around how you use an EPD, because not every time you submit the EPD it’s exactly what the client is having. But with those base numbers and figures that we have in the EPDs, it’s really easy for them to get the figure they’re after.

What challenges did you face, that our expert consultants helped you to overcome? 

The challenges, certainly for me, heading this up and trying to drive it from the UK was to convince our European board of directors that it was necessary. Also that it wasn’t going to give up intellectual property rights or sensitive information about how and where and what we do, and how we produce.

But Blue Marble were very good at reassuring us and the team sat on various teams meetings with myself and some colleagues in Germany to alleviate that pain they thought we were going to go through.

What impact have EPDs had, for you and your clients?

The result is that we have plenty of clients awaiting EPDs. And even actually producing them for our clients, and being able to let them have them has been a result. They’ve been very pleased with that as the EPDs are quite unique in the market.

So the benefit is being shown just because it’s proving to our clientele already that we were active and doing it. I think it will show that we win jobs from it because they’re going to work with us again.

Do you have any advice for other manufacturers facing similar challenges?

Yeah, I think it’s quite scary when you start thinking about the process and what information you need to give.

But I think jumping in and doing it will benefit your company for definite. I think something that we didn’t realize we would need it for, and now want to use it for is measuring how we can improve. That’s something we’ve subsequently looked at, and obviously now we’ve got a benchmark to start from.

It actually shows there’s plenty of room for improvement. And as other people get on board, and as competitors of ours who come to produce their EPDs, it gives us a measure to then improve and hopefully lessen our impact on the environment.