PCR harmonisation

One of the most important properties of type III environmental declarations (EPD) is that they provide possibility to add up LCA-based information in the supply chain and enable comparisons to be made between declarations with regard to the environmental performance of products and services. To achieve this, data collection, calculations and presentation of the results must be done in the same way based on the same methodology.

However, parts of an EPD usually differ somewhat for various types of products and services, due to variations in their inherent environmental performance. Therefore, so-called product-specific requirements (PCR) have to be prepared for selected product groups and service types.

It is necessary to harmonise PCRs being developed in different countries and among different type III practitioners in order to develop EPD into a global concept for communicating environmental performance of products and services. The main objective in future co-operations between countries in this field is that PCR documents should be valid in all countries taking part of the co-operation. As a consequence of this, only one document for a given product or service should ideally be approved and used in various countries for international applicability. Hence, a co-operation between countries in the field of PCR will most likely prohibit that several PCR documents will appear on the market for the same product group or service type which will support the ongoing international process in harmonising EPD programmes.

GEDnet has, as one of its goal, an ambition to become an important international vehicle for harmonisation of PCR. A key activity to accomplish this goal is to keep track of PCR work in different countries and to collect the information in an open searchable database easy available on the Internet.