Environmental Product Declarations — transparency reporting for sustainability

The understanding and implementation of sustainable design has evolved significantly over the past decade. Today, leading edge green building design
teams analyze and model the building’s construction and operational performance to determine the environmental impacts over the life of the project.
To support this analysis, the design community is pushing manufacturers to develop and publish Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) as a concise,
credible and consistent report card about a product’s impacts on the environment.
This paper looks at the market influences on EPD reporting and identifies the latest building codes, standards and rating systems that incentivize EPDs
submissions. It will review the requirements for developing an EPD, based on criteria from Product Cate gory Rules for content, verification and formatting. It describes how both the manufacturer and end user of the product can benefit from EPD development, along with a directory of PCRs and
EPDs within the cement, concrete and concrete products industry.

Author: D.D. Shepherd

Section: Ecology and safety

Keywords: environmental product declaration, climate change, green building, life cycle assessment, product category rule