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With the green movement sweeping the world, it’s no surprise that there are hundreds of green labels to choose from. This saturation in the market can make it difficult for people to make the right choices and get the most honest and transparent environmental information about the products they purchase. Customers can be sceptical over green claims, and rightfully so.
With that in mind, the European working group CEN TC 350 created the new standard EN 15804 Sustainability of Construction Works – Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), with the aim of offering one synchronised European and Worldwide standard for reporting of environmental performance. An EPD is a verified and registered document that communicates transparent and comparable information about the life-cycle environmental impact of products.
There are 24 environmental indicators within the assessment process of the EPD, which are broken down into 4 categories: Environmental Impact Indicators (7), Resource Indicators (10), Waste Indicators (3) and Output Flow Indicators (4). The seven Environmental Impact Indicators measure a product’s potential impact on global warming, ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication, formation of tropospheric ozone, and abiotic depletion of non-fossil fuels and fossil resources.
EPDs are important because they:
- Communicate verifiable, accurate, non-misleading environmental information for products and their applications, expressed in information modules, which allow easy organisation and expression of data throughout the life cycle of the product
- Provide a way to develop a Type III environmental declaration of construction products and is part of a collection of standards intended to assess the sustainability of construction works. It provides core product rules (PCR) for Type III declarations
- Harmonisation of schemes such as BREEAM (UK), DGNB (Germany), fDES (France) and Green Tag (Australia), for example = EN 15804
- The information is reported the same way across all building product
Here at Polyflor, we have EPDs available for most of our flooring ranges which provide completely transparent information about our products and their impact on the environment. Sustainability is a priority for us, from the ground up. We’re fortunate to be able to adopt a system that so effectively measures the environmental considerations that we put into our products. For us, it’s a measure of success.