What is an EDP ?
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 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.
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.
When developing an EPD, the environmental performance of the product should be described from a life cycle perspective by performing a life cycle assessment (LCA) of the product. The results of the LCA study and other information required by the reference Product Category Rules (PCR) and general program instructions must be compiled in the EDP report format. The EPD must then be verified by an approved independent verifier before being registered and published via the International EPD System portal.
Why EPDs are needed ?
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.
Several internal and external drivers make up the rationale for setting up EPDs, including:
- EU legal and market regulations (coming soon)
- Marketing
- Benchmarking
- Ecodesign
- Sustainable supply chain management
- 'Green' building schemes
- Environmental Management Systems
ASP accompanies you in the process of drawing up the EPDs and follows you up to the registration of your EPDs in the Environdec system. For companies in Morocco and Africa, this is a vital competitiveness issue to continue to access EU markets.
