Everybody in town is talking about EPDs this year, especially in the construction sector.
With the arrival of the EU-wide standarised ECO EPDs in 2013 there is no way but follow the EPD route.
The guys at green spec have explained very well what EPDs and Product Category Rules are about.
Last week I participated in a very interesting debate about growth, sustainability and decoupling with The Guardian Sustainable Business – read the discussion here
I don’t believe we need to stop growth to be sustainable. And I mean growth in the hardcore GDP terms (even if I don’t believe GDP is the right metric). I think we can achieve decoupling. I understand that if you look at decoupling in the last 30 years, the picture is not encouraging but hey, we havent really even tried to decouple!!!
Would it be nice if in every single office you entered you could see the energy efficiency cerficate displayed?
That would create a healthy competition for greener buildings, based on transparency and standardised metrics. Employees would complaint to their facility management colleagues for embarrasing performance and landlords would have an incentive for improving energy performance of buildings.
That’s the power of transparency.
Although this is partial rather than full transparency.
Full transparency would be to display g CO2 of the total life cycle of a building. But DECs are absolutely essential because they address a quick win: the inneficies in energy consumed by buildings. I really thing this subtle self-name & shame will add more value to green buildings than rating tools. And the most interesting bit, it will reduce value of less green buildings.
UK-GBC and BPF have joined forces to lobby to extend DECs to commercial buildings by 2012.
See their latest letter to the UK government here: BPF UK-GBC Open Letter to Government on DECS
Defra has launched a consultation on GHG emissions reporting by UK companies (See here consultation document).A number of businesses, led by The Aldersgate Group believe the Government must introduce regulations for all large businesses to report their carbon emissions (Click here for the full press release).
My view is that carbon reporting should be mandatory for large companies. Big business come with big responsibilities and they need to help society to deal with climate change. Reducing absolute emmisions should be scrutinised publicly and this process starts wiht mandatory reporting.
But if we want to get businesses to come up with real solutions we need to make mandatory to report at product level. Most of the impacts of companies are outside their boundaries, either in their supply chains or customers. What’s the point of a car company reporting their corporate emissions? They should focus on the car emissions, which is several times bigger. Same for many physical products like a carpet tile, where around 70% of the impact is embodied in the raw materials.
So mandatory corporate reporting is good but mandatory EPDs (product reporting) would be even better….
We are hosting an event in our London showroom to explain the transformative role that EPDs and transparency will have in shaping the sustainability agenda for this decade.
We will talk about how EPDs will shape supply chain management, green marketing, regulation, campaigning.
Tuesday 29th March 2011 @ InterfaceFLOR Showroom
1 Northburg Street, London EC1V 0AL
Please RSVP to g.reid@forumforthefuture.org
A great article on EPDs in OnOfficeMagazine discussing the ‘green rise’ in their industry
The office and furniture industry starts to get EPDs and their power to make informed decisions based on scientific facts.
It’s great to see how well respected gurus like Martin Hoenle, design consultant and editor of thequietriot.com support EPDs rather than vague claims. Nice points also about ISO 14001, how can people reduce all their sustainability strategy to such a standard. Excuuuuse me we are in 2011!!!!
Well done to my colleague Lynne Gawthorpe for explaining such a geeky subject in a nice language.
This Thursday I will be speaking about Green PR and advertising in Moscow.
Yes, Russian companies have woken up to the marvels of green marketing and I will be talking about EPD and our just the facts approach.
Some have asked what my opinion is on the DEFRA’s guidance on green claims. I think it is a very well crafted document with clear guidance.
I specially like part 3: HOW TO MAKE A GOOD ENVIRONMENTAL CLAIM.
The check list makes the right points. How many companies make claims of insignficant issues while not talking about the big issues. For example, recycled or reduced packaging claims which many times refer to a tiny fraction of the overall product impact while embodied impact of raw materials or the use phase is the real issue.
I am very dissapointed that DEFRA does not push for EPDs as the way for backing claims. The report talks that claims need to be relevant to main impacts and clear comparison of performance with others in the market. But the report does not explain that the only way to compare clearly is defining a functional unit, using an agreed Product Category Rule and doing a LCA and third party validated EPD accordingly.
They also talk of scope and boundaries and truthful and accurate representation of the scale. What better than an EPD for that? Why leaving room for companies to tweack the LCA assumptions for supporting claims?
Again, they talk about substantiation and appropriate standards. But no sign of PCRs, functional units and EPDs.
The examples of bad and good practice are brilliant. They summarize the current cheekiness of brands and offer easy examples of how to make right claims. But what can be more substantiation than full product transparency? i.e. publishing all the EPDS for all your products (showing all the impact categories by life phase, ingredients, etc) Again, no sign of this. Instead they mention irrelevant standards to product claims such as GRI or AA1000, which have corporate scope.
We have produced a RIBA accredited CPD (Continous Proffesional Development) presentation, which can be done both on-line and face to face.
The CPD deals with the issue of transparency and EPDs. The content includes the following topics:
The online CPD lasts just over 30 minutes. At the end of the presentation there is an assessment slide and answers 5 questions, which are randomly selected. If the answers are correct it automatically, we will send a certificate.
Introduction page: http://www.ribaonlinecpd.com/company/03781/home03781.asp
Direct to presentation: http://www.ribaonlinecpd.com/streaming/03781_facts/index.asp
1.Energy efficiency
Companies, countries and society have already figured out that tackling the negawatts is usually the most profitable way of cutting carbon. 2011 will the year where inneficiencies will be tackled in an impressive variety of ways. From companies profiting from selling innovative solutions to consumers, other companies and governments to green deals from governments. Even in Russia where climate change is not a popular topic, energy efficiency is one of the biggest topics for the year.
2. Full transparency will show up the true impacts
After the previous decade, people have had enough of carbon geezing, the term I use to include things such as companies saying they are carbon neutral even if it’s not the point, the abuse of offsets standars, the thousands of magic labels, etc. Full transparency (publishing all the impacts of all the life cycle stages of all your products) will be the only way your customers will trust you.
3. Legislation: leading companies will say ‘bring it on’
Tired of minimum-common-denominator business-association-led type of lobbying and advocacy, leading companies will tell governments yes to smart legislation. Yes, to efficiency standards, to a reasonable carbon price floor and well crafted bans (eg our wish of a ban on carpet landfill). Governments are realizing of how tiring and useless are voluntary agreements if there is no stick or threat attached to it. But smart legislation wont mean going back to the old school green legislation using the environment as an excuse for taxation.
4. The come back of the environmental geek
Companies will start hiring more people with ability to do proper LCAs because they need to understand their impacts at product life cycle level. And they will hire less in green spin doctors because the LCA facts will speak by themselves
The BAU exhibition has started in Munich (17th – 22nd January), one of the world’s leading trade fairs in architecture, materials and systems.
We’ve got a cool stand with an almost impossible design (see picture).
At BAU, we are showing how design leadership is compatible with sustainability. We are also campaigning for full product transparency, the idea of publishing all the environmental information of all the stages of the life cycle of a product, in a third-party validated Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).
Full Product Transparency is here today, beyond the building sector.
Well, not fully in the sense of the whole EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) following a product category rule but certainly a transparency move that not many companies are following yet.
In the following website, you can download an eco-profile for all Nokia’s products and accessories.
For example for the popular high end N95, you get this.
Hopefully the rest of the electronic industry follows and agree product category rules and start publishing proper EPDs for all products.
It’s such a nice surprise to see big consumer product multinationals embracing LCA as a day by day management tool.
Henkel uses a LCA approach and have created a system to rate their own products.
They call it Sustainability#Master. See their presentation here
Unilever has recently committed to halve their environmental impacts of the products measured in full life cycle. See their presentation here
I think the next step for both consumer product companies and retailers should be full product transparency.
They should agree on product category rules and then calculate the impacts according to these product category rules rather than their own systems.
That would allow for comparability. Then, the next step should be publish Environmental Product Decelerations (EPDs) according to the agreed product category rules.
This is what has happened in the floor industry and our commitment to publish EPDs covering all our products. I believe that next big competition in sustainability will be re-designing products and services to dramatically reduce their impacts.
This will be fuelled by transparent, comparable EPDs.
Many people have asked about a list of all the Product Category Rules (PCR) that exist today. PCRs are the rules needed to produce an EPD, which is fair and comparable.
CFP from Japan has produced a list to all the PCRs for different products from notebook computers to rapeseed oil.
http://www.cfp-japan.jp/english/gpl/product_category/all-lists/
If your company buys any of those products, you can support full environmental product transparency by asking your supplier or manufacturer to produce an EPD.
So how does an EPD look and what does it contain? It fully discloses all of the ingredients and raw materials. There is no way to hide chemicals or components. It also discloses where the raw materials come from, and of course the full environmental impacts across various categories including all life cycle stages. See an EPD
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