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The Role of Product Data in Meeting Sustainability Reporting Requirements

Whether you’re supplying concrete, cladding, insulation or adhesives, sustainability is no longer just a buzzword—it’s becoming a buyer requirement.

Trade buyers, contractors, and procurement teams are being asked to choose products based on environmental impact. That means you need to provide the right data—on your website, in your catalogues, and across your channels.

And here’s the problem: most of that information doesn’t live in your ERP. It’s scattered in PDFs, hidden in technical docs, or missing entirely.

To stay relevant—and compliant—you need to treat sustainability-related product data the same way you treat pricing, stock, and specs.

Table of Contents

What Kind of Sustainability Data Are We Talking About?

Depending on the product, buyers are now asking for:

  • Embodied carbon values
  • Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs)
  • Recycled content percentages
  • VOC emissions and hazardous materials
  • End-of-life handling guidance (can it be recycled, reused, or needs special disposal?)
  • Compliance with regional standards (like BES 6001 or LEED contributions)

This isn’t just a “nice-to-have” for a few eco-conscious customers. These requirements are turning up on tender docs, RFQs, and pre-qualification forms across commercial and infrastructure projects.

If you can’t provide the data? You risk being excluded from the shortlist

The Challenge: Where is this Data Stored?

Often, this kind of information exists—but it’s:

  • Embedded in long-form PDFs
  • Only available from the manufacturer (if requested)
  • Inconsistent between suppliers
  • Difficult to keep updated across your systems and website

So your team ends up manually attaching docs to emails, chasing down declarations, or defaulting to “not available.”

That’s not scalable—and it’s not helping your customers meet their obligations.

How Enriched Product Data Can Help

To make sustainability data accessible and usable, it needs to be:

  • Structured (e.g. separate fields for EPD link, recycled content %, carbon per unit)
  • Centralised (so internal teams and customers get the same version)
  • Searchable (customers need to filter by environmental criteria)
  • Updatable (you can’t be stuck with last year’s declaration)
This doesn’t mean you need to show everything on every product page—but you should have it, and be able to surface it when needed.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let’s say you sell insulation products. A properly enriched product record might include:

  • Material type and R-value
  • % of recycled content
  • PDF link to the product’s EPD
  • VOC emissions level
  • End-of-life instructions
  • CE/UKCA compliance
  • Region-specific sustainability info

Now imagine that data feeding your:

  • Website filters
  • Sustainability-focused tenders
  • Print catalogues
  • Internal sales tools and rep portals
It’s a big shift—but it’s also a growing expectation.

Need to prepare your product data for sustainability reporting?

We help construction suppliers structure and enrich environmental attributes so they’re accessible, accurate, and tender-ready.

Chat with us about your sustainability data readiness.

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