User:Mliao2/FB 595 Final Part3

The Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is an environmental certification classified as Type III that quantifies and verifies the life cycle of products and goods as cited in the International Standards Organization (ISO) 14025. The EPD methodology is based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool which follows the ISO series 14040. EPDs help customers that are environmentally driven for the performance of a product to make the best decisions when choosing goods or services among different providers. For instance, companies such as ABB have implemented EPDs to all of their main products in an attempt to improve their sustainability goals, furthermore, to demonstrate their commitment to the environment to the customers that have shown concerns for the environmental faith of their products.

Framework for Creating an EPD
Figure 1. presents the steps or framework for creating an EPD, one of the first steps is that the product is defined and that it must follow the Product Category Rules (PCR) which are specific rules and requirements verified by a PCR review third-party panel (independent party). The collection of the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) for the LCA study must be verified and from reliable sources (e.g., from manufacturing facility). The Life Cycle Environmental Impact Analysis (LCIA) results are performed by an LCA expert using software and different assessment tools. The EPD can be delivered as a document or report that follows a series of verification until it is ready for registration and to make it public.

EPD to Advance the LCA
EPD now is a standardized tool to declare the credible data and information of the environmental impacts of a product based on LCA studies. Introducing EPD to the LCA field can enrich the data sources with higher quality level data. Using the data from EPD can be a reasonable option for the life cycle inventory analysis even though collecting EPD data is a secondary data collection method. If more and more stakeholders can publish the EPD reports, the LCA studies have the potential to be more accurate and to have a higher resolution. In other words, encouraging EPD equals to enlarging the quantity and diversity of the database for LCA studies. The problem emerges from the emergence of EPD is the harmonization issue or say the issue related to the universality, which has been common for some LCA databases. The harmonization refers to the process of transforming the results into a common scheme of representation before releasing so that the results can be easily compared and verified in the future. The issue may be solved by defining minimum requirements for the current EPD schemes, like making widely accepted standards. For example, Manzini et al. explored some practical requirements for developing EPD reports and the parameters affecting the attractiveness, potential costs, and benefits of EPA reports and proposed a framework for the EPD developers. Then this issue was solved by this framework? Without this discussion, this example is useless in demonstrating your previous statement.

Examples of Developing EPD and Using EPD for Decision-making
Back to 2001,  Allander published an article of EPD for an ABB Group product. The article stated the reasons for generating the EPD report and the key focusing aspects in the process of developing the EPD report. The processes steps and product requirements were described in the article related to the production. If compared to this LCA study by Allander, the EPD report emphasized more about the life cycle impact assessment phase in the author’s report. One interesting point related to this report was that the author clearly stated that “customers are increasingly asking for information concerning the environmental performance of products”. In 2007, Del Borghi et al. conducted four case studies of waste disposal in a sanitary landfill to declare the potential environmental impacts. The four case studies compared different technologies for waste treatment and leachate or biogas management in the EPD framework adopted by the authors. The results of analyzing four case studies showed that using the EPD tool enabled the comparisons among different declarations only with some modifications to the existing method, PSR 2003:3, which was a method of preparing EPD reports and published by the Swedish Environmental Management Council. More EPD reports are available from the online databases (e.g. The International EPD System ).

EPD in Europe
In Europe, the European Committee for Standardization has published EN 15804, a common Product Category Rules (PCR) for EPD development in the construction sector. Other complementary standards, for example for environmental building assessment (EN 15978) were also published by this Technical Committee.

In order to enhance harmonization, the main Programme Operators for EPD verification in the construction sector has created the Association ECO Platform, with members from different European countries.

The Programme Operators approved to issue EPD with the ECO Platform verified logo are:


 * 2014:
 * Asociación Española de Normalización y Certificación (AENOR) - GlobalEPD Program (Spain)
 * Bau EPD GmbH (Austria)
 * EPD International AB - International EPD System (Sweden)
 * Institut Bauen und Umwelt e.V. (IBU) (Germany)
 * 2015:
 * Building Research Establishment Limited (BRE) (United Kingdom)
 * EPD Danmark (Danmark)
 * Instytut Techniki Budowlanej (Poland)
 * 2016:
 * Association HQE tio - FDES INIES (France)
 * ICMQ S.p.a. - EPDItaly (Italy)
 * DAPHabitat - DAPHabitat System (Portugal)

ECO Platform also include Associations, for example:
 * Construction Products Europe
 * Ceramie Unie ASBL
 * Eurima AiSBL

Some of these Programme Operators are under bilateral mutual recognition agreements like IBU (Germany), EPD International (Sweden) and AENOR GlobalEPD (Spain).

EPD in North America and Asia
Even the European-based EPD programs constitute a large portion of EPD programs all over the world, the followed North America and Asia EPD schemes are also non-negligible. Some main programme operators in North America and Asia are also summarized below :


 * North America
 * FP Innovations - EPD Program on Wood Products (Canada)
 * NSF International (U.S.)
 * The Institute for Environmental Research & Education - Earthsure EPD (U.S.)
 * The Sustainability Consortium (U.S.)
 * UL Environment (U.S.)
 * ASTM International (U.S.)
 * Carbon Leadership Forum (U.S.)
 * ICC Evaluation Services (U.S.)
 * National Ready Mixed Concrete Association (U.S.)
 * SGS Global Services (U.S.)


 * Asia
 * Japan Environmental Management Association for Industry (Japan)
 * Korean Environmental Industry & Technology Institute (Korea)
 * Environment and Development Foundation (Taiwan)