Green Topics

• Forest Management & Certification
• Main Environmental Standards
• EPD and Life Cycle Assessment
  • Guide to EPD Compliance with EN 15804
  • Guide to Environmental Indicators
  • Three Types of EPD
• EPD for US Panel Products
• EPD Product Category Rules
• LCA – Useful Definitions

Environmental Product Declaration and Life Cycle Assessment

An essential part of green building, life cycle assessment (LCA) offers an objective and consistent way to measure the environmental impact of all types of constructions and the materials from which they are made. See Role of LCA in Green Building and APA’s Green Topics.

To ensure quality and comparability of LCAs, the construction industry has adopted a common format  – Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).  This is designed to create a low carbon, more resource efficient, sustainable built global environment. An EPD provides information on a product’s environmental impact and covers resources, energy use and efficiency, global warming potential, emissions to air, soil and water, and waste generation.

The American Wood Council (of which APA is a member), with the Canadian Wood Council, released Environmental Product Declarations for softwood_Plywood_EPD, OSB_EPD, I_Joists_EPD and LVL_EPD.

EPD is based on international standard  ISO 14025:2006 which establishes the principles and specifies the procedures for developing Type III environmental declaration programmes and Type III environmental declarations.  ISO 14025:2006 was also the basis for the new environmental standard, recently updated – EN 15804:2012 +A1:2013.   See also main environmental standards.

Within the  Construction Products Regulation (CPR), an EPD is used to assess the impact of a product on sustainable construction. Decision-making at design stage can be improved by combining environmental impact data and whole life cost data and linking them to ‘building information modelling’ (BIM) data.

The ECO Platform is made up of is European organisations wishing to harmonise various environmental profiling schemes across Europe with the European standard EN 15804 – Sustainability of construction works: Environmental product declarations. Core rules for the product category of construction products. This would lead to mutual EPD recognition across regional borders.