How Nucor Is Building EPDs at Enterprise Scale
Summary
As demand for transparent, product-level environmental data continues to grow, Nucor is expanding its use of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to demonstrate product excellence and support informed decision-making across the construction value chain.
Rather than treating each EPD as a one-off deliverable, Nucor is taking a scalable approach—building reusable Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) models that can be efficiently adapted across facilities, product lines, and configurations. To support this strategy, Nucor partnered with Trinity Consultants, experienced LCA practitioners, and adopted CarbonGraph as the underlying modeling infrastructure.
Together, they are establishing a repeatable foundation for EPD development—one that reduces duplication, improves consistency, and supports an expanding portfolio of verified product disclosures. This initial release represents the first phase of a broader EPD rollout aligned with Nucor’s long-term sustainability and transparency goals.
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About Nucor
Nucor is North America’s largest steel producer, operating a diverse network of steel mills and downstream facilities. The company has publicly committed to transparency and continuous improvement in environmental performance, recognizing that product-level disclosures like EPDs play a critical role in helping customers evaluate materials, meet project requirements, and support lower-carbon construction.
As customer expectations and reporting requirements continue to evolve, Nucor is investing in systems that allow sustainability data to be produced with the same rigor, repeatability, and scalability as its manufacturing operations.
About Trinity Consultants
Trinity Consultants is a leading environmental consulting firm with deep expertise in life cycle assessment, sustainability strategy, and regulatory compliance. As Nucor’s consulting partner, Trinity serves as the LCA practitioner—developing models, validating assumptions, and ensuring alignment with applicable EPD program requirements.
Using CarbonGraph as the modeling platform, Trinity is able to apply its domain expertise within a structured, reusable system—focusing effort on analysis and quality rather than rebuilding models for each new EPD.
The Challenge: Scaling EPDs Across a Complex Manufacturing Footprint
For organizations operating multiple facilities and product lines, scaling EPDs presents a fundamental challenge. Traditional workflows often treat each EPD as an isolated project, requiring teams to rebuild full LCA models even when underlying processes, facilities, or assumptions overlap significantly.
At enterprise scale, this approach leads to:
Duplicated modeling effort
Increased risk of inconsistency across EPDs
High marginal cost for each additional product disclosure
For Nucor, the goal was not simply to publish individual EPDs, but to establish a system that could support many—across facilities, products, and future updates—without starting from scratch each time.
Strategy: Reusable, Parameterized LCA Models
To address this challenge, Nucor, Trinity, and CarbonGraph focused on structuring LCA models as reusable building blocks rather than standalone artifacts.
Using CarbonGraph’s modeling framework, facility-level and process-level components can be parameterized and linked together. Key variables—such as production volumes, energy mixes, and process configurations—are represented as parameters, allowing models to be adapted without duplicating core logic.
This approach enables:
Reuse of facility models across multiple products
Consistent assumptions applied across EPDs
Flexible assembly of models to reflect different facility combinations or product scenarios
Instead of rebuilding full models for each EPD, practitioners can compose and adapt existing components—supporting both efficiency and transparency.
Implementation: Building the First EPDs
With this modeling strategy in place, Trinity Consultants used CarbonGraph to develop and publish Nucor’s initial EPDs under the SmartEPD program.
The workflow emphasized:
Structured data ingestion and modeling at the facility level
Parameterized adjustments for product-specific configurations
Clear traceability from underlying data to final EPD outputs
The resulting EPDs demonstrate not only compliance with program requirements, but also the viability of a scalable, repeatable approach to product sustainability reporting.
Results and Early Impact
The successful publication of these EPDs marks an important milestone for Nucor’s sustainability program. Beyond the individual disclosures themselves, the project established a modeling foundation that can be extended across additional products and facilities.
Early benefits include:
Reduced duplication of LCA modeling effort
Increased confidence in consistency across disclosures
A clear path to expanding EPD coverage over time
Most importantly, the work shifts EPD development from a series of isolated projects to an integrated, enterprise-ready system.
What’s Next: A Broader EPD Rollout
These initial EPDs represent the first phase of a larger rollout. With reusable, parameterized models in place, Nucor is positioned to expand EPD coverage across more products and facilities while maintaining consistency and auditability.
As sustainability reporting requirements evolve, the same modeling infrastructure can also support updates, revisions, and future program changes—without rebuilding from the ground up.
CarbonGraph and Trinity Consultants will continue to support Nucor as it scales its EPD program, helping ensure that product-level environmental data remains robust, transparent, and aligned with the pace of the business.