2008-01-14

Climate declarations based on environmental product declarations, EPD - do they meet market and customer requirements?

Background

Type III environmental declarations or environmental product declarations, EPD, according to ISO 14025 are generally considered to deliver scientifically-sound, neutral and credible information about the environmental performance of goods and services. As they are based on life cycle assessments following ISO 14040 and 14044, they cover all relevant stages in a products life cycle.

Typically, EPD information is normally reported in a format including pre-determined compulsory information for all relevant environmental impact categories, regardless of the intended use of the information by different audiences. This type of communication of an often very complex nature has unfortunately led to a relatively low market penetration of EPD information. The international EPD®system did at an early stage identify this problem and, as a response, introduced the concept of “single-issue EPDs”, as a digest of an entire EPD with the ambition to adjust the information into a simpler format in order to better meet to various market and customer requirements.

One area where there is a constantly growing demand for information is climate change. The international EPD®system has therefore issued so-called “climate declarations” as the first example of single-issue EPDs. A climate declaration “describes the emissions of green-house gases, expressed as CO2-equivalents for a product’s life cycle. It is based on verified results from life cycle assessment (LCA) - based information in accordance with ISO 14025″. A selection of some existing climate declarations, with an attempt to present them in a fairly similar manner, is given below:

- Coated Folding Boxboard from Djupafors Cascades
- Electricity form Wind Power from Vattenfall
- Electricity from Hydropower from Vattenfall
- Electricity from Nuclear Power from Vattenfall
- Bottled milk from Granarolo
- Bottled mineral water from Cerelia

The issue of single-issue declarations was shortly discussed during the last ISO/TC 207/SC 3 meeting in Beijing in late June 2007 and was found to be an interesting concept of communicationg EPD information. At the same ISO/TC 207 meeting proposals were raised to start developing new standards for environmental communication related to climate change. Currently, other initiatives have been taken by a number of organisations for developing systems and tools related to environmental impact caused by emissions of CO2 - two of them being “carbon foot-printing” and “carbon-neutral product labelling”.

The international network for EPDs - the Global Type III Environmental Product Declarations Network (GEDnet) - a non-for-profit organisation with members from many countries around the world, is a liaison partner to ISO/TC 207/SC 3. One of the main objectives of GEDnet is to improve and promote the use of EPDs based on ISO 14025 as well as to provide the basis for credible and meaningful product information. At the last GEDnet meeting held in conjunction to the above mentioned ISO TC 207-meeting, GEDnet noted the ongoing discussions on possible new standards for communicating climate issues and decided to take an initiative to inform interested parties and stakeholders about the possibilities to make use of the existing standard ISO 14025 and its still untapped potential to suit many of the market and customer requirements on climate change information - one example being climate declarations as issued within the framework of the international EPD®system.

Objectives with the questionnaire

The main objective with the attached questionnaire is to get feed-back on the suggested concept of climate declarations and collect information on improvements and modification to better adjust and further develop climate declarations to better suit various information needs as they appear to different audiences.

The questionnaire is divided into three parts - a first part to receive responses on the attached examples on climate declarations, the second part to receive suggestions for improvements and a third part for stakeholder identification.

Download the complete questionnaire (PDF 60 kB)