In the construction and building materials sector, demand is growing for environmental product declarations (EPDs). An EPD is a report that summarizes a product’s environmental impact. While regulation is a key motivator, the commercial advantages should not be underestimated.
Business benefits of EPDs
An environmental product declaration (EPD) provides verifiable, accurate and transparent environmental information about products and their applications. It is based on a product’s life cycle assessment (LCA), which details potential environmental impacts, including energy and resource inputs as well as emissions and waste across manufacturing, distribution, use and end-of-life.
EPDs give companies a foundation to measure, communicate and improve the sustainability performance of their products. With cleaner, greener products, businesses contribute to positive change in their sector. Key business benefits include:
- Market access and green building certification: EPDs provide standardized, third-party verified data that supports supplier comparison and selection. As a result, EPDs are increasingly included in company-specific sustainability requirements in requests for proposals (RFPs). Verified EPD data also enables access to green building certification programs such as BREEAM, LEED and DGNB. Builders seeking certification typically use products with EPDs that clearly state the environmental impact of materials.
- Green procurement: Buyers use EPDs to assess how environmentally preferable a product is compared to alternatives. With EPDs, companies can gain a competitive advantage in green public procurement.
- Decarbonization tool: The granular information generated during the life cycle assessment for EPDs feeds the overall organizational decarbonization goal.
- Supply chain transparency: Ideally, EPDs contain product data specific to facilities and manufacturing processes across the supply chain.
- Competitive edge: In industries such as electronics, automotive and textiles, EPDs can support marketing claims about product environmental performance.
The need for EPDs
Across industries and regions, downstream customers and political regulations increasingly demand that manufacturers disclose the environmental performance of their products in a comparable and verifiable way. These disclosures often rely on the environmental transparency provided by EPDs.
Recent legislation and various measures encourage or require EPDs in the construction and building materials sector. Incentives and regulations include the following:
- Several U.S. states—such as California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington—have implemented Buy Clean initiatives to reduce embodied carbon in public construction. These policies use EPDs to assess and set limits or benchmarks on the environmental impacts of materials like concrete, steel, glass and asphalt.
- The EU Green Public Procurement program contains requirements and voluntary criteria for member states to acquire products that pose the least environmental harm. EPDs provide clear, verifiable criteria based on product LCAs.
- The revised Construction Products Regulation (CPR) entered into force on January 7, 2025. For products placed on the European single market, the CPR requires companies to disclose environmental performance data—such as EPD-based indicators—within the Declaration of Performance and Conformity (DoPC) and communicate them via a Digital Product Passport (DPP), a new framework for sharing standardized product and environmental data.
- To help decarbonize the building sector, the revised EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) requires member states to calculate and disclose the lifecycle global warming potential (GWP) for new buildings in the energy performance certificate. The LCA results in EPDs will be part of such assessments.
How to create an EPD
Performing a life cycle assessment (LCA) of a product is foundational to an EPD. Assessments must follow product category rules (PCRs), which ensure that functionally similar products are evaluated consistently.
Companies just starting their sustainability journey typically hire experts to conduct product LCAs and create EPDs. More advanced organizations with broader LCA commitments may have inhouse practitioners using software tools and data. These practitioners depend on cross-functional input—engineering, plant management, design, procurement and supply chain, finance, marketing, and environment, health and safety—to provide the data required for LCAs and EPD creation.
EPD program operators—such as The International EPD System, Smart EPD, IBU, UL, PEP ecopassport, INIES and EPDItaly—are independent bodies that oversee the EPD process in accordance with ISO 14025. All EPDs must be verified by an authorized, independent third party before registration and publication on the selected program operator’s portal.
How Sphera can help
Creating an EPD for the first time can be complex and time-consuming. Selecting reliable, industry-based LCA data can be challenging, third-party quality assurance is rigorous, and additional hurdles frequently emerge. Companies must address geographic differences in PCR requirements (e.g., North America vs. the U.K. or Germany). Program operator availability can affect timelines, so early outreach is prudent. Finally, EPDs require updates every five years. While updates are easier than initial creation, they still entail data collection and recalculation.
Sphera’s EPD experts support your organization throughout the entire EPD process. Whether you are creating your first EPD or scaling and automating EPD generation, our sustainability consultants tailor services and solutions to your needs.
- EPD support and training: Sphera’s consultants help you launch or advance your EPD program and provide training, software and data to create EPDs independently.
- EPD as a service: Sphera’s experts can generate EPDs for your products, including data collection, modeling, results calculation, benchmarking and reporting.
- EPD at scale: Sphera’s ecodesign and EPD tools, based on parameterized LCA models developed by our experts, help you create EPDs for a larger number of products—significantly reducing time and cost.
- EPD automation: Sphera’s LCA software and databases, integrated into your enterprise systems, enable automated EPD generation across product portfolios. A consistent view of sustainability performance improves process efficiency and decision-making, leading to better outcomes.
For many businesses, a core motivation for creating EPDs is a commitment to transparency. Corporate strategy also benefits from the shift toward verifiable sustainability data. With data-driven, science-based EPDs, companies credibly walk the walk.
