Today, the global market has an increased demand for science-based, verified and comparable information about environmental performance of products and services. The demand comes from several market places, such as in the raw material supply-chain, for product development and green procurement.
The international EPD® system is a member of the Global Type III Environmental Product Declarations Network
The international EPD® system has, as a main objective, the ambition to help and support organisations to communicate the environmental performance of their products (goods and services) in a credible and understandable way by offering a complete programme for any interested organisation in any country to develop and communicate EPDs according to ISO 14025.
More and more, product-related environmental issues are becoming of concern for businesses and consumers who are looking more critically at the environmental credentials of products before they buy. This can be seen in the development of environmental management systems around the world, where systems tend to focus more and more on the importance of evaluations of environmental performance of products and services.
Developments like these require that businesses and organisations have objective and reliable information about environmental aspects of products and services, so that they can place the information in their own contexts and make their own decisions.
Despite the rather challenging task to describe complex processes in the environment, the overall goal of an EPD is to provide relevant, verified and comparable information to meet the various needs within an organisation including e.g. within environmental management systems EMS, for Eco-design, and in green procurement.
An environmental product declaration, EPD, is defined as "quantified environmental data for a product with pre-set categories of parameters based on the ISO 14040 series of standards, but not excluding additional environmental information".