EPD 101

What is an EPD?

Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) are the international standard for measuring the Global Warming Potential (GWP), commonly known as the carbon footprint, for concrete and all construction and other products.  Especially in construction, EPDs are increasingly used as essential data in the buyer’s purchase decision-making process.  EPDs have been adopted as the global standard and are 3rd party verified.  Often compared to a nutrition label for food, an EPD is a standardized report used by product manufacturers to provide quality and assured environmental performance information about their products.

An EPD is based on the full life cycle assessment of a product as laid out by international standard ISO 14025. This standardized approach, which is verified by a third party, was designed to communicate the environmental impacts of a product in a scientifically sound, streamlined, and comparable way. EPDs are a credible and fair basis for comparison among products that use the same Product Category Rules (PCR) and allow companies to transparently communicate about their products based on factual environmental claims, while also serving as a key metric for manufacturers to design and build lower impact products.