Environmental Product Declaration

They are primarily intended to facilitate business-to-business transactions, although may also benefit environmentally motivated retail consumers when choosing goods or services.

The text and illustrations are designed to be easily understood and the environmental impact information desired by most EPD users can be found in one or two tables.

[8] Progress has been made to improve the design of EPDs for machine-readability and indexing purposes for the construction industry through the EN ISO 22057 standard, ILCD+EPD[9] and openEPD[10] formats.

A Life Cycle Environmental Impact Analysis (LCIA) is performed by an LCA expert using software and a variety of assessment tools.

[18] Criteria contained in a PCR includes: a description of the product category, the goal of the LCA, functional units, system boundaries, cut-off criteria, allocation rules, environmental impact categories, information on the product's use phase, required units, LCA calculation procedures, requirements for data quality assessment, and other relevant information.

In order to enhance harmonization, the main Programme Operators for EPD verification in the construction sector created ECO Platform, with members from various European countries.

The Programme Operators approved to issue EPDs with the ECO Platform verified logo[29] are: The ECO Platform also includes the following trade associations: Some Programme Operators are under bilateral mutual recognition agreements, including[30] IBU (Germany), EPD International (Sweden) and AENOR GlobalEPD (Spain).