Environmental product declarations are the cornerstones for the Building Life Cycle Assessment. They can be used for identifying ways to streamline manufacturing processes in order to reduce embodied carbon. EPDs also enable the comparison of the environmental performance of similar products and should ensure their equal treatment. Nowadays, EPDs are a measure of competitiveness similar to price, which maintains a genuine competition between product manufacturers and leads to a genuine intention to reduce their emissions.
Requirements of EPDs are described in the International Standards (ISO 14025). At a bare minimum, they should be objective, provide comparable information within the same product group and always third-party verified for life cycle analysis, life cycle inventory analysis, and the information it contains.
Peikko prepared its first EPD document over 10 years ago. In that time, the environmentally conscious clients started to require a compact document handling all relevant information. But having just an EPD is no longer enough, the actual content decides who is involved in the construction project and who is not. The clients are mainly comparing values of Global Warming Potential (GWP) from different product manufacturers, and this factor is properly explained in the paper.
Read the White Paper - EPDs in plain language
