Environmental Product Declarations: exploring their evolution and the factors affecting their demand in Europe

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study conducted to analyse the growing use of Environmental Declarations as environmental communication tools, together with the factors that have led to this situation in Europe. To do so, and focusing on the EPD programme called the International EPD System, an exhaustive analysis was performed of the evolution of Product Category Rules (PCR) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD). The next step was to draw up a survey to be administered to companies that currently have EPD in that programme in order to identify the factors that led to its being chosen as an environmental communication tool, the communication channels through which they came to know about the programme, the target public of EPD, whether or not they intend to renew it and the reasons for not doing so if that is the case, and so on. Despite a progressive growth in the use of EPD, according to the companies, the main weakness of these programmes is the fact that final consumers do not know about EPD. Implementing actions geared towards raising awareness about them may therefore play a key role in maintaining and continuing to increase the success of EPD programmes.

Life cycle assessment in corporate sustainability reporting: Global, regional, sectoral, and company‐level trends

“…EPDs have recently been promoted in the building sector by the EU regulation No. 305/2011(EC, 2011Ibanez-Fores et al, 2016), and this sector has shown a net increase of issued EPDs (Ibanez-Fores et al, 2016). This is reflected to some extent in the current study because the construction and materials sector presents an LCA presence of approximately 7% in CS reporting for the past 5 years, hence slightly higher than the average (see Table S3 in Results S1).…”

“…Launched in 2002, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative has been working towards building an expert community of practitioners and reaching the worldwide dissemination of the LCA methodology and life cycle thinking among businesses, governments, and consumers through its different working groups (Bjørn, Owsianiak, Molin, & Hauschild, 2018;Sonnemann et al, 2018;Töpfer, 2002 (EC, 2003), the directive on the eco-design of energy using products in the EU region (EC, 2009), the eco-labeling scheme (EC, 2010), the EU better regulation toolbox (EC, 2015), and the PEF and OEF guidance documents (EC, 2016(EC, , 2018a. Type III environmental information on products, in the form of Environmental Product Declarations (EPD; Ibanez-Fores, Pacheco-Blanco, Capuz-Rizo, & Bovea, 2016), are directly associated with conducting an LCA following a set of product categories rules. Type I eco-labeling of products does not require the conduction of LCAs; yet a type I eco-labeled product must fulfill a number of requirements along its life cycle.…”

“…More recently, Hörisch, Ortas, Schaltegger, and Álvarez (2015) surveyed the use of diverse sustainability management tools in 186 large North American, Japanese, Spanish, and South Korean companies in 2012 and found that nearly 50% of them indicated using LCA-based tools. A recent study of EPD practices showed that the building and the food and beverage sector were particularly active in issuing EPDs (Ibanez-Fores et al, 2016). In a recent study based on a survey of 800 large European companies, Chiarini (2014) found that both service and manufacturing companies acknowledged the ability of LCA to effectively improve the environmental performance of their supply chains.…”

Addressing Climate Change in Responsible Research and Innovation: Recommendations for Its Operationalization

“…Unfortunately, only around 650 EPDs are currently included in the online database, despite belonging to a wide range of product categories. Besides, Ibáñez-Forés et al [76] explain that EPD are still generally unknown, and that is the reason why few EPD are used, and even fewer are added to the database. Consequently, EPD cannot cover the research demand for many disciplines.…”

Aiding eco-labelling process and its implementation: Environmental Impact Assessment Methodology to define Product Category Rules for canned anchovies

“…Today there is an increasing interest across Europe in establishing guidelines that facilitate and drive the measurement and communication of the environmental behavior of products and organizations [15]. Ecolabels are used by manufactures and distributors to provide information about the environmental performance of their good on a voluntary basis.…”