Introduction to a digital EPD format for Swedish building products.
There is a need to standardize the digital format for life-cycle information for building materials. It is primarily the European Standard EN 15804 that is used to calculate the product's environmental impact throughout its life cycle and the information is then verified by a third party and communicated trough an EPD, Environmental Product Declaration. This report describes the state of the art for digital formats under development in EU for EPDs, and a suggestion of wich format should be applied in the SBE-Livscykelperspektiv project.
The international outlook shows that it is mainly the different national program operators for EPDs that are developing the digital formats in Europe. These operators ensure that there are rules for how a particular product group is to be calculated and that the EPDs published have been verified by a third party. To a large extent, program operators have similar views on how to design the digital format. Central to the development and coordination of this work seems to be the International Open Data Network for Sustainable Building (In Data). However, differences can be seen, mainly depending on the scope of product areas of the programme operator and how national or international the different systems are. A recommendation for the future is that the Swedish building sector engages or monitors the work done in InData.
The digital format proposed in Sweden for EPD should be based on Ökobau.dat 2013 and the further harmonized ILCD + EPD format developed by InData's working group. However, some additional formats are required to handle specifically metadata and property data. The most important additions are identification and traceability of the product and quality of the calculated environmental data. Many of these extra needed data sets are available today in the eBVD system and could be combined to get a more extensive description of the environmental performance of the product. So schematically, a format consisting of ILCD + EDP + metadata + property data, is proposed.