Environmental Product Declarations

What are EPD’s?

An EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) is a verified and registered document that communicates transparent and comparable information about the life-cycle environmental impact of a specific product.

Within the construction industry, EPD’s support carbon emission reduction by making it possible to compare the impacts of different materials and products in order to select the most sustainable option.

An EPD is usually valid for five years, and is generated according to relevant standards, such as EN 15804.

An EPD is created and registered in the framework of a programme, along with verification by an accredited certification body, or a recognised individual verifier.

EPDs help to achieve credits in certification schemes such as LEED, BREEAM and others.

Having an EPD for a product does not imply that the declared product is environmentally superior to alternatives — it is simply a transparent declaration of the life-cycle environmental impact.

How are Hardscape responding to requests for EPD’s/product specific carbon footprint data?

We are requesting product specific EPD’s from our supply chain partners and are collating and logging the key data from these, along with providing this information to our Clients on request.

Where a verified product specific EPD is not available from a supplier, Hardscape are encouraging supply chain partners to perform a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), including assisting and guiding them on collecting the relevant data, modelling the product life cycle and calculating the results. EPDs are relatively complex technical documents containing lots of different data. However, if you are trying to reduce the carbon footprint on a particular project you do not have to go through all of it, as what you’re looking for is the Global Warming Potential (GWP) value. Usually, this is expressed as a scientific number, so if your EPD says GWP of a kg of product is 2,5E-2, that means it’s 0,025 kg CO2e.

There are several types of EPDs that cover different life-cycle stages of a product:

  • Cradle-to-gate EPD involves only the manufacturing process and harvesting of a material. It has the minimum amount of data for life-cycle assessment.
  • Cradle-to-grave EPD includes the whole life-cycle of a product, specifically covering its maintenance and the end of life

EPD’s with a “Cradle to Gate” footprint boundary are becoming the norm as opposed to “Cradle to Grave”, which can be harder/more expensive to calculate/produce.

If you require specific EPD data then please send your request and information to: enq@hardscape.co.uk

Download our EPD pdf here.

To view our Group Carbon Reduction strategy statement please click here.