What is EPD?
Environmental Product Declaration
EPD is a verified and registered document that communicates transparent and comparable information about the life-cycle environmental impact of products.
An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) transparently reports objective, comparable, and third-party verified data about products and services' environmental performances from a lifecycle perspective.
Where the EPD is the final report, the foundation of any EPD is a life cycle 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 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.
In physical terms, an EPD consists of two key documents:
The underlying LCA 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 LCA results and other EPD content.
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.
Wondering about EPDs and how to get one?
Get registered on our EPD Portal and receive step-by-step guidance for EPD creation and publication. Our support team will also assist you with the process.
A short summary conveying an EPD's value!
Does EPD include sensitive commercial information?
EPDs communicate sensitive commercial information, correct? No, this is absolutely not the case!
Factually, as little as it is correct that surströmming, a Swedish delicacy, tastes worse than it smells...
The public EPD document does not include sensitive commercial details of e.g. your own manufacturing processes or up and down-stream supply chain partners and activities. An EPD is used to communicate the life-cycle assessment results, only. The public EPD that is published via the EPD Portal/website does not contain any such specific details.