EPD stands for Environmental Product Declaration. An EPD is a document in which you can find data about the environmental impact of a certain building material. This data is presented in a standardized way, which makes it a lot easier to compare different materials. You can use this data for a building level assessment or building evaluation scheme. But what kind of information will you exactly find in an EPD? And how do you read and use it?
How does a product perform in different stages of its lifecycle? That’s the central question that an Environmental Product Declaration, also known as an EPD, answers. EPDs are there for many types of products. The content you’ll find in an EPD varies depending on the product category, but within a category, the set-up of an EPD will always be the same. This makes it easy to compare similar materials. You can find the EPD on the website of the manufacturer, on the website of the EPD issuer or in a national database.
As you can imagine, it’s really important to look at all the life stages a product goes through to define how sustainable it is. A product might be produced in a very sustainable way, but if it will only last for a short time or if it’s impossible to reuse or to recycle afterwards, then it’s not very sustainable in the end. That’s why you’ll find information about multiple life stages in an EPD.
In every EPD, the system boundaries of all these separate life stages are defined. There are five stages: production, construction, end of life and the potential for reuse, recovery or recycling. These five stages are referred to with letters. The stages often consist of a number of sub-factors.
The EPD lifecycle stages include the following:
Do you want to know more about EPDs? In this article, we tell you more about the environmental impact indicators that are used for an EPD.
Rockpanel provides the information you need to create sustainable buildings. Please find relevant documentation and certificates, including our externally verified Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) here.
Every single year, the ROCKWOOL Group continues to progress towards our sustainability goals. Download our Sustainability Report to learn more about our progress, achievements and our new commitments:
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We manufacture board material mostly used in ventilated constructions, for facade cladding, roof detailing, soffits and fascias.
