GREEN BLOG

EDPs - Combating Greenwash

POSTED DECEMBER 13, 2010

The Environmental Product Declaration, or EPD, is the designer and specifier’s newest tool to verify product manufacturers environmental claims. It could end up as one of the most valuable new tools or a colossal flop.

Here’s what I like:

• An EDP is intended to provide a basis for comparison of products and services based on their inherent environmental performance and impacts without value judgments or predetermined performance levels that must be met.
• EDPs begin with a very detailed life cycle assessment based on international accepted methods (ISO 14025). Those results are then third-party verified to assure complete transparency and disclosure throughout the supply chain.
• The system is open to all products and services and makes comparisons possible through the establishing of so-called Product Category Rules (PCRs) for selected product groups and services.
• The assessment report for a product or service is comprehensive, exposing warts and all.

Some of the very things that make EPDs so attractive may also doom it to failure. To begin, it’s intimidating. The website (http://www.environdec.com/pageId.asp) is thorough to a fault – and thoroughly confusing. A potential applicant first must comply with the general EPD requirements and then tackle the PCRs that describe the harmonized LCA-rules for data collection, methodology, calculations and presentation of the results. Huh?

The EPD organization admits the very complex nature of its system “has unfortunately led to a relatively low market penetration of EPD information.” One response has been to introduce the concept of a single-issue EDP rather than a multiple attribute report. For example, growing demand for climate change data has led to the Climate Declaration, which "describes the emissions of green-house gases, expressed as CO2-equivalents for a product's life cycle.”

Headquartered in Sweden, EDP is used primarily in Europe. However, it gained a major boost in the U.S. with the recent announcement by Interface that it is committing to EDPs for all its flooring products by 2012.

Interface Founder and Chairman Ray Anderson said, “Our EPDs will be based on the most rigorous, third-party verified life cycle assessments used anywhere on Earth, measuring and disclosing environmental impact throughout our supply chain, from well-head and mine, to end of life reclamation and recycling.”

President and CEO Dan Hendrix believes that the “new standards of accountability will ultimately spur new levels of innovation, as customers begin to understand the impacts of their purchasing decisions and demand more from business and industry.”

It will be interesting to watch if EDPs take off, especially with the announcement at Greenbuild of a strategic partnership between the Healthy Building Network (http://www.healthybuilding.net/) and BuildingGreen (http://www.buildinggreen.com/). The two organizations most noted for unbiased, untainted material assessments have linked their web-based green building tools, Pharos (http://www.pharosproject.net/) and GreenSpec (http://www.buildinggreen.com/menus/). A new website, GreenSpecPharos.com (http://www.greenspecpharos.com/), will provide access to the combined product databases of the two organizations as well as “a new research collaborative that will focus its work on accelerating the pace of independent research on product toxicity.”

Any way you look at it, verifying product claims just became easier. That’s a very good thing.

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