Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Environment Product Declaration (EPD)

LCAs and EPDs are becoming more common both as suppliers are disclosing the information as part of their transparency efforts and as buyers are requesting this to fulfil their environmental goals and requirement. In the EU, some standards, such as EN 15804+A4 for the construction related materials, and platforms for EPD, such as Environdec, are being used. In Japan we have Ecoleaf. As more and more data are being covered by LCA and EPD it is important that there is harmonisation between various systems to avoid that additional costs. This can become significant considering the number of products of a given company. It should be mentioned that some collaboration already exists. Usage of Product Category Rules (PCR) should be promoted and harmonised to reduce the efforts on EPDs of products within the same category. The EU is slightly more advanced/ahead in the efforts due to the already started implementation of CBAM.