Lodestellar: Transforming EPD Quality Assurance
In the construction industry, the era of greenwashing is fading as manufacturers adopt data-driven tools to prove their environmental impact. Lodestellar, a €7-per-use platform, is at the forefront of this shift, offering automated quality checks for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). These declarations are critical for winning multi-million euro tenders, where specifiers increasingly rely on verified carbon data rather than vague marketing claims.
The Problem with Traditional EPDs
EPDs are scientific, independently verified documents that detail the environmental impacts of building products. However, creating them is costly—often exceeding €10,000 per declaration—and time-consuming, taking up to six months. The complexity of standards like EN 15804+A2 and ISO 21930 leads to frequent errors, causing back-and-forth with verifiers and delays that can lose tender opportunities. With approximately 50 EPDs published daily, the verification bottleneck is growing, increasing legal risks and costs for manufacturers.
How Lodestellar Works
Lodestellar acts as a “linter” for EPDs, analyzing draft declarations against hundreds of requirements. It checks for missing explanations, ambiguous assumptions, inconsistent wording, omitted mandatory disclosures, and poor traceability between data and results. Unlike manual reviews, which can take weeks, Lodestellar provides a detailed line-by-line report in minutes, flagging issues early. This allows developers to fix problems before formal verification, reducing revisions and accelerating publication.
The tool reads an EPD, detects applicable standards automatically, and returns guidance. It also supports background reports and is being refined with internal benchmarking to track performance. Currently, it checks both draft and already-published EPDs, with the team reporting that every reviewed EPD had at least some issues that could have been resolved earlier.
Built by Experts for the Industry
Lodestellar was conceived in 2022 during an Estonian digital construction hackathon, winning first place. The team includes CEO Anni Oviir, an LCA lecturer and EPD verifier, and CTO Tanel Teinemaa, a seasoned software developer from Estonia’s vibrant tech scene. They combined their expertise to codify complex standards and develop an extensive checklist. The tool is now used by major building product manufacturers and has received praise from independent verifiers like Dr. Roger Singleton of Riskoa and Professor Callum Hill, who call it an essential extra pair of eyes in a high-stakes verification process.
Market Impact and Future Potential
The construction sector accounts for about 40% of global greenhouse emissions, making carbon accountability urgent. The European Commission’s new framework for building life cycle calculations is pushing manufacturers to adopt EPDs or risk losing tenders. Lodestellar addresses this by lowering barriers: it costs just €7 per use, making it accessible even for small firms. As AI advances, tools like Lodestellar will become even more critical, enabling buyers to compare products across multiple factors—carbon cost, fireproofing, acoustics, price—with credible data at the core.
Oviir emphasizes that the tool is not about “AI buzzwords” but delivering results. She notes that her own EPDs contained issues caught by the system, highlighting the value of an independent quality layer. The team is developing features to analyze background reports and expand benchmarking. As digital product passports and stricter regulations loom, Lodestellar positions itself as a key enabler of transparent, trustworthy environmental disclosures. For manufacturers, the message is clear: ditch unsubstantiated eco-slogans and let data speak.