Environmental Product Declaration

EPD is a verified and registered document that communicates transparent and comparable information about the life-cycle environmental impact of products.

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is a Type III environmental declaration in accordance with the ISO 14025 standard. It provides objective, transparent, and third-party verified information about the environmental performance of a product or service throughout its life cycle. Unlike ISO 14024 Type I third-party certified ecolabels and ISO 14021 Type II self-declared environmental claims, an EPD is grounded in verified data on the environmental performance of a product in relevant life-cycle stages.

The demand for EPDs is rapidly increasing — not only for voluntary sustainability initiatives, but also in response to emerging regulatory requirements mandating the disclosure of verifiable environmental data. 

An EPD is based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology according to ISO 14040 and 14044, conducted in accordance with Product Category Rules (PCRs). LCA enables manufacturers to assess environmental impacts throughout the product’s entire life cycle, from raw material extraction, production, and use phase to end-of-life management. 

After verification, the EPD is developed and registered within a recognised programme, such as the International EPD System (IES). All EPDs registered in the IES are publicly available and free to download via the EPD Library.

Key Components of an EPD: 

• LCA Report
  A comprehensive, systematic summary of the LCA project, developed to support third-party verification. This document is not publicly disclosed. 

• Public EPD Document
  A publicly accessible report that presents verified LCA results and other relevant information in a standardised format. 

While an EPD provides transparent information about a product’s environmental performance, it does not imply environmental superiority over alternative products. 

Note: The public EPD document does not disclose sensitive commercial details such as proprietary manufacturing processes or information about supply chain partners. Its sole purpose is to communicate the verified life cycle assessment results.

The most common type of Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is the single-company, single-product EPD, which represents a specific product or service offered by a single manufacturer or service provider. This type of EPD is based on a product that has been in production or available on the market for at least one year, and it reflects the life cycle environmental performance of that product. 

It may include data from multiple manufacturing sites, provided the products from these sites are not marketed as different or distinguishable by the downstream customer. 

In addition to the standard single-product EPD, the International EPD System (IES) also accepts a range of other EPD types, and a single EPD may fall under more than one of these categories: 

• EPD of a single product from a manufacturer/service provider  

• EPD of multiple products from a company  

• Sector EPD  

• EPD published by trader  

• EPD of product not yet on the market  

• EPD of product recently on the market  

These alternative EPD types are outlined in more detail in the General Programme Instructions (GPI), and they may be subject to specific or additional requirements compared to the standard EPD development and maintenance process.