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Environmental product Declaration
What is an EPD?
What is an EPD?
An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is an independently verified and registered document that communicates transparent and comparable information about the life-cycle environmental impact of products in a credible way.
Where the EPD is the final report, the foundation of any EPD is a lifecycle assessment (LCA). This LCA allows you to evaluate your product’s environmental performance over its entire life-cycle. It typically takes into consideration your full value chain, from material extraction through to manufactured product, its usage stage and end of life.
An EPD is a so-called type III environmental declaration that is compliant with the ISO 14025 standard. A type III environmental declaration is created and registered in the framework of a programme, such as the International EPD® System. EPDs registered in the International EPD System are publicly available and free to download through the EPD Library, accessible via this link.
In physical terms, an EPD consists of two key documents:
EPD background project report, a systematic and comprehensive summary of the LCA project to support the third-party verifier when verifying the EPD.
This report is not part of the public communication.Public EPD document that provides the results.
As a voluntary declaration of the life-cycle environmental impact, having an EPD for a product does however not imply that the declared product is environmentally superior to alternatives.
Continue reading to find out more about the EPD - what is it, and what not? And why they will be beneficial to your business.
Why does the world need EPDs?
Why does the world need EPDs?
The overall goal of an EPD is to provide relevant and verified information to meet the various communication needs.
An important aspect of EPD is to provide the basis of a fair comparison of products and services by their environmental performance. EPDs can reflect the continuous environmental improvement of products and services over time and can communicate and add up relevant environmental information along a product's supply chain.
EPDs are based on principles inherent in the ISO standard for Type III environmental declarations (ISO 14025) giving them a wide-spread international acceptance.
Single-company, product-specific EPD
Single-company, product-specific EPD
The single-company, product-specific EPD is the most common type of EPD. Its based on a valid PCR and describing the life cycle environmental impact of one (1) or - very similar products - from one single manufacturer.
Single-company EPDs provide data on one product made by one manufacturer, but can encompass several factories. When a manufacturer produces a product in several plants thorughout the world, but all plants use the same processes, they can be covered by a single EPD.
In LEED v4, this is referred to as a "Product-specific Type III EPD".
Project and product-specific EPD
Project and product-specific EPD
Project and product-specific EPDs are useful when specific data for an exact product and project (e.g. in public procurement) are requested by the EPD users and e.g. the transportation calculation would somehow differ from the one documented in a verified EPD.
The project specific, single product EPD compulsorily requires a manufacturer to have a single-company,single product EPD that forms the basis for the project specific adapation.
PLEASE NOTE!
Project specific EPDs can cause some market confusion, because some peer EPD programme operators offer the publication of such non third-party verified LCA-studies via their systems as an ISO14021 Self-declared Environmental Claim, and not as an ISO14025 verified Environmental Declaration. Often these reports claim ISO14025 compliance, but come accompanied with notations regarding the EPDs' internal verification or self-declaration characteristics.
Group EPD
Group EPD
Similar products made by the same manufacture can be included in a Group EPD.
Similar products from a single or several manufacturing sites covered by the same PCR and manufactured by the same company with the same major steps in the core processes may be included in the same EPD if the differences between the declared environmental performance indicators are lower than ±10%.
One set of results shall be declared for one representative product.
The choice of representative product shall be justified in the EPD, using, where applicable, statistical parameters.
Sector or Industry Average EPD
Sector or Industry Average EPD
A Sector EPD is developed by an industry asscociation and declares the average product of multiple companies in a clearly defined sector and/or geographical area.
Products covered in a Sector EPD shall follow the same PCR and the same functional/ declared unit shall be applied.
Any communication of the results from a sector EPD should contain the information that the results are based on averages obtained from the sector as defined in the EPD.
The communication shall not claim that the sector EPD results are representative for a certain manufacturer or its product. As that, a single EPD cannot represent several products and several manufacturers.
In the context of EN 15804, a Sector EPD is sometimes referred to as an "Average EPD". Elsewhere, they could be referred to as "Industry-wide EPD" or "Generic EPD".
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