Concept

Environmental Product Declaration (EPD)

Also: EPD · Type III environmental declaration

A standardised, independently verified document that reports the life-cycle environmental impacts of a product, produced according to ISO 14025 and the relevant Product Category Rules.

Updated

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is a Type III environmental declaration as defined in ISO 14025. It presents quantified environmental information about a product across its life cycle, derived from a life cycle assessment (LCA) that follows a Product Category Rule (PCR) for that product group.

What an EPD contains

An EPD reports impact indicators (for example global warming potential, acidification, eutrophication and resource use) per declared or functional unit, broken down by life-cycle stage. It also documents the system boundary, the data sources and the assumptions behind the numbers. Construction product EPDs in Europe follow EN 15804 as their core PCR; internationally, ISO 21930 plays the same role.

Why EPDs matter

EPDs are the common currency of product-level environmental data in construction, and increasingly in other sectors. Green building schemes, public procurement rules and corporate reporting all draw on them. An EPD does not by itself say that a product is “good”; it makes the product’s impacts transparent so that they can be compared, within the limits set by the PCR.

Verification and registration

Before publication an EPD is independently verified against the PCR and the underlying standards, then registered and published by a programme operator. EPDs carry a validity period, commonly five years, after which they must be updated.

Where Verdatir fits

Verdatir’s review engine checks EPD documents and their underlying data against EN 15804+A2, ISO 14025, ISO 21930 and the applicable PCR clause by clause, flags gaps for a qualified reviewer, and records every decision in an audit trail that programme operators and verifiers can rely on.

Sources and further reading

In practice

Verdatir turns the rules behind this term into automated checks with a reviewer in the loop.

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