Environmental product declarations entering the building sector: critical reflections based on 5 to 10 years experience in different European countries

Abstract

Purpose Growing awareness of the environmental performance of construction products and buildings brings about the need for a suitable method to assess their environmental performance. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become a widely recognised and accepted method to assess the burdens and impacts throughout the life cycle. This LCA-based information may be in the form of environmental product declarations (EPD) or product environmental footprints (PEF), based on reliable and verifiable information. All of these use LCA to quantify and report several environmental impact categories and may also provide additional information. To better understand on the one hand existing EPD programmes (EN 15804) for each country and on the other the recent developments in terms of EU reference document (e.g. PEF), the authors decided to write this review paper based on the outcomes of the EPD workshop that was held prior to SB13 Graz conference. Methods This paper presents the state of the art in LCA and an overview of the EPD programmes in five European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland) based on the workshop in the first part and a comprehensive description and comparison of the PEF method and EN 15804 in the second part. In the last part, a general conclusion will wrap up the findings and results will provide a further outlook on future activities. Results and discussion The high number of EPD programmes underlines the fact that there is obviously a demand for assessments of the environmental performance of construction materials. In the comparison between and experiences of the different countries, it can be seen that more similarities than differences exist. A comparison between PEF and EPD shows Responsible editor:

Environmental assessment in the building materials industry: How are the results of life-cycle-assessment (LCA) for concrete influenced by technology and regulations?

“…This led to the emergence of EPD programs (mostly in Europe, Canada and the US) that started developing and publishing specific methodological frameworks for product categories, called PCRs (Product Category Rules). In 2015, (Passer et al, 2015) state that more than 28 EPD programs exist worldwide referring to ISO 14025" (…), providing more than 2256 PCR documents and more than 3600 EPDs (see (Passer et al, 2015(Passer et al, , p. 1201). Yet, the growing number of LCA studies for construction materials also revealed the need to further develop the method (Abd Rashid and Yusoff, 2015;Augiseau and Barles, 2017;Buyle, Braet and Audenaert, 2013;Petek Gursel et al, 2014;van den Heede and Belie, 2012).…”

“…Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is decision support tool frequently used and well established to promote sustainable management as well as sustainable construction. International standards for LCA have been developed and the database for construction materials is constantly growing (Passer et al (2015). In many countries, this data is used in building labelling and certification schemes for sustainable construction.…”

“…Looking at different LCA studies for concrete there is a surprisingly wide rage in the results for different environmental impacts such as Global Warming Potential (GWP) or Cumulative Energy Demand (CED). Some of this variation can be explained by the use of different data sources or methodological choices (Dossche, Boel and Corte, 2017;Ehrenberg, 2018;Passer et al, 2015). Yet, even within an identical methodological framework using the same data sources, results can vary up to 100% for the same type of concrete (NRMCA, 2016).…”

Characterization of the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Program in the Context of Eco-labels and Environmental Declarations

“…In the last few years, there has been a high interest in the assessment and certification of construction-related materials through EPDs [24][25][26]. Moreover, green-building certification schemes (GBCS) such as the ones of the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) [27], the British Sustainability Assessment Method for Buildings (BREEAM) [28] or the United States (US) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED ® ) v4 [29], recognize the use of EPDs for the disclosing of the environmental information of construction products.…”

Potencial and limitations of environmental design with LCA tools

“…LCA software programs in architecture became common in the last decade as environmental data on building material was increasingly available in the form of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) (Passer et al, 2015) or national databases. Institutions provide open access to databases like Ökobau.dat (BBSR, 2016) and Wecobis (Haas & Asam, 2014) and with knowledge on the method of LCA, the data can be linked to the building substance.…”