Environmental Product Declaration Home Page

An EPD is a standardized (ISO 14025/TR) and LCA based tool to communicate the environmental performance of a product or system, and is applicable worldwide for all interested companies and organizations.

A declaration is based on a Life Cycle Assessment. It includes information about the environmental impacts associated with a product or service, such as raw material acquisition, energy use and efficiency, content of materials and chemical substances, emissions to air, soil and water and waste generation. It also includes product and company information.

Certified EPDs are open for all products and services. There is no evaluation of the environmental information since no predetermined environmental performance levels are set. Instead it builds on well-structured and quantitative data certified by an independent third party.

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) presents quantified environmental data for products or systems based on information from a LCA conducted according to the ISO-standards for LCA. EPD is voluntarily developed information and the purpose is to provide quality-assured and comparable information regarding environmental performance of products.

The information presented in this section is based on the framework developed by the Swedish Environmental Management Council. This system is the most internationally recognized of its kind. Certified EPDs can be found and downloaded from the web site link above.

There are two documents, which control how the calculations and data collection behind an EPD should be done and what information the EPD must contain; Requirements for the EPD system (MSR) and Product specific requirements (PSR). The MSR contains general requirements for all EPDs and a PSR contains more detailed requirements for each product group.

EPDs can reflect the continuous environmental improvement of products over time and are able to communicate and add up relevant environmental information along a product's value chain. EPDs also add new market dimensions to inform about environmental performance of products and services - objectivity, comparability and credibility.

Environmental Product Declarations

Introduction