Why manufacturers use Lodestar:
Why manufacturers use Lodestar:
Reduced uncertainty
By conducting a pre-verification quality review, manufacturers and their clients gain early confidence in an EPD during its development stage. This can enable commercial discussions and project decisions to tentatively proceed, subject to the verification.
Better resource efficiency
After fixing potential issues early and internally, there will be fewer clarification rounds, fewer corrections, and less back-and-forth during the later EPD verification process.
Faster timescales, lower costs
Manufacturers can approach verification with a measurable record of their EPD quality and completeness, reducing the workload of verifiers who no longer need to quote costs and timescales based on worst-case quality assumptions.
Reduced compliance risk
A pre-verification quality review provides a deeper understanding of your own EPD, reducing potential unknown weaknesses. This additional layer helps guard manufacturers, not just against the risk of a delayed or failed verification, but also the risk that a published EPD of unsuitable quality could later become unusable for regulation, procurement, or building-level assessments, or face legal challenge from a competitor.
Raised EPD literacy
EPDs offer more value when more people better understand them - and not just EPD specialists. A pre-verification quality review offers clear explanations that makes EPD quality understandable to everyone in your organisation who wants to unlock the value of EPDs.
How Lodestar works
How Lodestar works
1. Submit your draft EPD
Include your background report and any supporting documents, and select your chosen programme operator.
2. Run a quality review
The tool runs more than 500 checks based on all applicable requirements from ISO 140025, EN 15804, PCRs, & your operator's checklist, as well as its own additional checklist.
3. Receive your feedback
Every check is rated as a pass, a minor issue, or a major issue with clearly presented feedback about any changes required, helping you ensure your documents are ready for verification.
EPDs are the future.
EPDs are the future.
The age of greenwashing is ending. Increasingly, it's only verified environmental impacts that matter.
The construction sector is leading the way with this by embracing Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs).
EPDs benefit the whole supply chain and enable the most innovative low carbon building product manufacturers to flourish.
And looming legislation is further increasing demand for EPDs, putting further pressure on EPD specialists.
But to ensure quality EPDs are widely available, the whole EPD process needs to be more intuitive for building product manufacturers. This is a challenge that EPD verifier and Lodestar cofounder Anni Oviir has long focused on solving.
Lodestar is born.
Lodestar is born.
Lodestar emerged out of Digital Construction 2022, which gathered construction and software specialists to accelerate the adoption of game-changing digital tools across the global construction sector.
It was organised by Garage48 hackathon and supported by the Estonian Digital Construction Cluster and the Estonian Economic Ministry. Their panel of industry judges awarded first place to Lodestar, led by Anni Oviir.
After some considerable concept development, an EPD verification management tool was granted EU funding in 2024 and its first iteration was developed.
In 2025, leading software developer Tanel Teinemaa joined as a cofounder and Lodestar was officially established with a complete rebuild from scratch and a focus on EPD quality review earlier during development. It was only in late 2025 that advances in AI enabled the level of quality required.
We are currently piloting Lodestar with select building product manufacturers and EPD consultants to incorporate the tool into their EPD development workflow, while also preparing the tool for wider use across other regulatory and standard-based documentation.
The right direction.
The right direction.
A pre-verification quality review helps resolve potential EPD quality issues at the earliest stage of EPD development.
From our own experience in EPD verification, we've seen all the patterns of EPD quality failures.
Thanks to the availability of good EPD development software, delays are decreasingly caused by incorrect calculations, software bugs, or database misuse. But a quality EPD requires deeper substance to justify its calculations and conclusions, which consumes the time of developers and verifiers.
EPD delays are most commonly caused by missing explanations, ambiguous assumptions, inconsistent wording across different sections, omitted mandatory disclosures, and poor traceability between data, assumptions, and results. Even for an experienced EPD developer, it can take considerable time to ensure all requirements are met to this standard.
Lodestar understands all these issues deeply and will help ensure your EPDs get going in the right direction.
FAQs
FAQs
How accurate is the quality review?
While Lodestar may enable EPDs to be produced faster and more affordably, our priority is raising EPD quality. Such is its thoroughness, we initially thought during early testing that Lodestar was overreaching with corrections, until we realised it was understanding specific requirements more deeply than we did as verifiers. We are currently conducting trials to compare the accuracy of a quality review through Lodestar against human verification. Our aim is to match the capability of top verifiers, but with unlimited capacity to thoroughly check all necessary data points regardless of time pressures. That being said, AI can still always make mistakes and must only be used for guidance. AI won't replace human verifiers, who are essential for accountability, but Lodestar can help speed up EPD creation while raising quality.
Can't I just use any AI chat platform for this?
To deliver a comprehensive and useful quality review, Lodestar is a specialised AI tool with a deep understanding of all relevant requirements and guidelines for your EPD, as well as our own checklist, and runs many hundreds of checks. Our own checklist enables a 'belt-and-braces' approach for ensuring reliable accuracy. It takes specific requirements and operator checklist points that could be misunderstood by AI and translates them as clearer instructions. Using an existing AI chat platform would require hundreds of prompts and not reach the same reliability.
How does Lodestar compare with quality tools within LCA software providers?
Lodestar is independent of all EPD programme operators and also LCA software providers, whose own tools are mostly focused on checking the integrity of LCA calculations, avoiding major issues, and validating the process. Lodestar checks EPD quality very strictly and comprehensively on all the requirements that have been outlined both in the standards and by the programme operators. This is revealing quality issues that, until now, are not even routinely complied with due to the extensive nature of regulations and requirements.
How is my company data stored?
Your data is kept secure and used only for providing the quality review and not for any other purpose. You can delete your data at any time and all data is automatically deleted after 60 days.
Will my company data be used to further train the AI?
No. It's only ever used to provide your own quality review.
Why is this called Lodestar?
A lodestar is a star used for navigation. Ancient seafarers once relied upon a lodestar, typically the North Star, to guide the course of their ships. In modern usage, a lodestar can be anything that serves as a guide to keep you going in the right direction. Verified environmental impacts now serve as the lodestar for growing a competitive, sustainable business. And our helpful quality review tool will guide you in the right direction to get that data declared as efficiently and reliably as possible.
Cofounders
Cofounders
Lodestar is led by an experienced EPD developer and verifier, supported by deep expertise in tech development, and a wider team of LCA professionals.
Anni Oviir
Anni is an EPD verifier who has worked in the LCA field for more than a decade, including as a lecturer. She's the founder of LCA Support, which provides EPD development or verification to leading building product manufacturers across Europe, the US, and the UK. Anni is also the co-author of Estonia's national carbon footprinting method for buildings, the co-author of the country’s green construction roadmap for 2040, and the Estonian partner of the Nordic LCA harmonization project.
Tanel Teinemaa
Tanel is one of Estonia's most sought-after software developers with a passion for clean, simple, and well-tested code. His experience with AI dates back nearly two decades as a leading Olympiad in maths, AI, and informatics. He has since gained more than 15 years of professional experience in intuitive software architecture, across both back and front end, including for Microsoft and Playtech, as well as the cofounder of Progmatic, which develops software for world leading tech companies, such as Pipedrive.
Adam Rang
Adam previously served at the Estonian Foreign Ministry and as Chief Evangelist for Estonia's hugely succesful e-Residency programme, at the forefront of supporting Estonia's digital state and the global adoption of game-changing technology from its startup scene. He has worked with early stage startups, including TransferWise, Taxify (now Wise and Bolt), and Pactum, which have since unlocked enormous value globally.