The era of greenwashing may be coming to an end, at least in the construction sector, where manufacturers are embracing a low‑cost tool to support data‑driven transparency about their environmental impacts. LED by CEO Anni Oviir, the Estonian team behind Lodestellar has created an automated quality‑check system for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). These declarations use scientific methodology and independent verification to reveal the environmental impacts of building products in detail. Manufacturers are now racing to get them published or risk being excluded from major tenders.
What Are EPDs and Why Do They Matter?
Environmental Product Declarations are standardized documents that quantify the environmental footprint of a product over its entire life cycle — from raw material extraction to disposal. They rely on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology and must be independently verified before publication. Increasingly, specifiers and buyers use EPD data to compare competing products. If a supplier lacks an EPD, specifiers must use assumed values that overestimate the carbon cost, putting that supplier at a clear disadvantage.
Looming legislation and market pressures worldwide are driving this shift. The European Commission has just published an EU‑wide framework to standardize how building life‑cycle impacts are calculated, making data more comparable across competing products. As a result, merely having a verified EPD can be a significant competitive edge in multi‑million euro tender processes.
The Verification Bottleneck
Around 50 EPDs are now published every day in the construction sector — an exponential rise that is overwhelming independent verifiers. EPD development is often carried out by non‑specialists, leading to frequent errors. Creating a single EPD typically costs manufacturers more than €10,000 and can take six months or longer, with several rounds of revision during verification. Any mistake caught late can delay publication, increase costs, and even breach tender deadlines. Worse, errors that slip through verification can expose manufacturers to legal risks as EPDs become more valuable and scrutinized in procurement decisions.
Lodestellar was created to fix this bottleneck. The platform provides an automated quality review that gives detailed line‑by‑line guidance on draft EPDs, based on all the complex requirements that verifiers will later check. By catching issues early, the tool dramatically reduces the cost, hassle, and delay of back‑and‑forth revisions.
How Lodestellar Works
The tool reads an EPD document (whether draft or already published) and automatically detects which standards apply — EN 15804+A2 or ISO 21930 — then returns a detailed report with clear, line‑by‑line guidance. It acts like a “linter,” the automated quality checker programmers use before publishing code. According to CTO Tanel Teinemaa, a seasoned software developer who has worked on several leading Estonian tech companies, even the best programmers rely on linters to catch small errors before they become big problems. Lodestellar applies the same principle to EPDs.
The team has examined years of verifier feedback and identified common patterns that cause delays: missing explanations, ambiguous assumptions, inconsistent wording across sections, omitted mandatory disclosures, and poor traceability between data, assumptions, and results. Lodestellar checks for all these issues, running hundreds of checks per document. It occasionally flags minor concerns, but the team says it has never missed an issue it was instructed to check.
Origins in an Estonian Hackathon
Estonia is renowned for its vibrant tech scene — producing more unicorns per capita than Silicon Valley, from Skype to Wise and Bolt. The country is also home to many building product manufacturers that export heavily to Nordic neighbours, where EPDs have been embraced early to maintain competitive advantage. In 2022, the Estonian Economic Ministry brought together software specialists and construction experts in a digital construction hackathon, aiming to spark game‑changing digital tools for the global construction sector. A panel of industry experts awarded first place to Lodestellar, providing support for further development. The project is now led by Teinemaa as CTO, with Oviir, herself an EPD verifier and LCA lecturer, serving as CEO.
Industry Validation and Quotes
Dr. Roger Singleton, CEO of Riskoa and operator of the EmVide AI LCA platform, says independent review will become increasingly important as software and AI accelerate the production of product‑level climate data: “The future of Life Cycle Assessment is faster, more digital and increasingly automated. But speed only creates value if the results can be trusted. Lodestellar adds an independent quality layer, so LCA software providers are not simply marking their own homework. As AI becomes more common in EPD workflows, that separation between creation and review will be essential for credibility.”
Professor Callum Hill, an independent LCA expert who verifies EPDs and advises on sustainable construction materials, notes: “From a verifier’s perspective, Lodestellar is useful because it acts like an extra pair of eyes. It gives a quick overview of potential issues, shows where the relevant requirement comes from, and helps highlight things that are easy to miss in complex models and documents. That is becoming more important as EPDs are increasingly used in tenders and procurement decisions, where mistakes can later become disputes.”
The tool is already being used by some of the biggest names in the building product industry, and the team is now developing internal benchmarking methods to transparently track performance over time. New features are also in the pipeline, including the ability to analyze EPD background reports.
Cost and Accessibility
Lodestellar is priced at just €7 per check, a fraction of the total cost of an EPD. The team emphasizes keeping the tool low‑cost and intuitive. “We want to raise EPD quality even beyond compliance,” says Teinemaa. “It’s only in the past year that the technology has really caught up with our ambitions.” Early adopters report that the detailed feedback helps them learn to produce higher‑quality declarations, even compared to feedback received during verification. So far, the tool has checked hundreds of EPDs, and the team says every single one — including those already published — had issues that could have been spotted with automated quality checks.
Oviir points out that the focus is on results, not buzzwords: “The companies at the forefront of extracting value from AI are also the companies that never use it as a buzzword in their marketing. Our team is excited about the tech, but we also know that ‘AI‑powered’ can sound about as meaningful as ‘eco‑friendly.’ In both AI and sustainability, results must now speak for themselves.” She argues that as AI advances, buyers will become more adept at weighing complex factors across all possible products, pushing the market toward credible, verified data. “So ditch any unsubstantiated eco slogans and just make sure you’ve got your data properly calculated and declared.”
Future Outlook
Construction accounts for approximately 40% of global greenhouse emissions, making carbon accountability in this sector critical. The EPD system, which began as a voluntary Nordic initiative, is now being codified into law. Inside the EU, EPD data will soon feed into new Digital Product Passports, further tying sustainability data to market access. As policymakers and buyers demand ever more rigorous environmental disclosures, tools like Lodestellar enable manufacturers to meet these requirements efficiently and affordably. The team is committed to keeping the platform accessible so that quality can be raised at scale, making a real impact on the construction industry’s journey toward transparency and sustainability.