Environmental Product Declarations – an extensive collection of availability, EN15804 revision and the ILCD+EPD format

Abstract

The increasing awareness on climate issues in the built environment places a greater responsibility on the different actors to map the building emissions, reduce and optimise the use of materials, and thereby lower the environmental footprint. With several countries enforcing legally binding CO2 limits to assess and benchmark the negative environmental side effects from buildings using the LCA method, it is presumable that practitioners from the industry will look for higher availability of data found from Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). As the availability of data more than likely will increase drastically over the years, the study provides an extensive look into the world of digitalised EPDs, and how to use the format to extract a comprehensive number of EPD data. The extraction of data from the ECO Platform leads to a total of 1478 entities, and when adding EPDs from EPD Denmark this study scrutinises 1644 EPDs in total, from 4 EPD Program Operators (EPD-POs). The extraction process highlights the need for transparency and more mutual agreements in the documentation methods. Further, the study scratches the surface of the revised European EPD Standard EN15804, and what the changes and the transition will mean for the applicability and transparency in the building sector and for LCA models when the majority of emissions from GWP will increase.

Sustainability Assessment of Cementitious Ceramic Tile Adhesives

“…The defective part of the current EPD scheme is the interpretation of the results [40]. It is also worth mentioning that the multitude of EPDs impact categories and the units in which individual environmental indicators are expressed are challenging to communicate and, thus, difficult to understand, creating a complex decision-making process [41]. Comparison of data contained in EPDs is often tricky because environmental impact values are calculated for different functional units [42].…”

The influence of EPD data on LCA results

“…The second scenario replaces generic data, where it is possible, with industry-and/or product-specific EPDs, which were the output of the first part of the study [11]. Here, the availability of EPDs was investigated for Danish construction.…”