Article Number : 6760 |
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| Date | 7/7/2011 9:08:52 AM |
| Written By | LGM & Associates Technical Flooring Services |
| View this article at: | //floorbiz.com/BizResources/NPViewArticle.asp?ArticleID=6760 |
| Abstract | By Dean Thompson, President, Resilient Floor Covering Institute The Resilient Floor Covering Institute has started the process of developing environmental product declarations (EPDs) for the North American resilient flooring industry. An EPD is a brief, third-party-verified report of product ingredients and their... |
| Article | By Dean Thompson, President, Resilient Floor Covering Institute The Resilient Floor Covering Institute has started the process of developing environmental product declarations (EPDs) for the North American resilient flooring industry. An EPD is a brief, third-party-verified report of product ingredients and their environmental impacts during the manufacture and life of a product. It presents quantified environmental data for products or systems based on information from a life cycle analysis (LCA) conducted according to the ISO-standards for LCA. EPDs are voluntarily developed information, and the purpose is to provide quality-assured and comparable information regarding environmental performance of products. EPDs can reflect the continuous environmental improvement of products over time and are able to communicate and add up relevant environmental information along a product’s value chain. EPDs also add new market dimensions to inform about environmental performance of products and services — objectivity, comparability and credibility. EPDs are meant to provide valuable, quantitative information about the environmental performance of products and services, and therefore could be of use to a wide range of stakeholders. This group broadly covers manufacturers, government agencies, specifiers, academia, consumer groups and professional procurement sections within a firm. EPDS MANDATED IN EUROPE EPDs for approximately 10 resilient flooring products were developed in Europe by the European Resilient Flooring Manufacturers’ Institute (ERFMI) and published on the ERFMI website. Each EPD was based on input from multiple flooring manufacturers and published as generic EPDs. The European Union has mandated that manufacturers declare the environmental impacts of their products, and EPDs have been published to fulfill this requirement. In the United States, there has been increased interest in EPDs with much of the attention being driven by federal agencies, especially the EPA, to use EPDs as a potential vehicle to comply with Executive Orders requiring these agencies to purchase environmentally preferable products. In order to develop an EPD in accordance with ISO standards, it is necessary to have agreement on the reporting rules, which would be followed by manufacturers in a specific industry — namely product category rules (PCRs). Additionally, to be in compliance with ISO standards, all impacted stakeholders must have an opportunity to participate in the development of the PCRs. U.S. FOLLOWS EUROPE’S LEAD During the USGBC meeting in Chicago last November, representatives from the resilient, carpet, laminate, ceramic and wood industries agreed to work together to develop PCRs for the flooring industry using the European PCR as the base document. It was agreed NSF would be the Program Operator for flooring and be responsible for the final PCR document. The first meeting of the PCR committee, consisting of 22 members, was held in April and regularly scheduled meetings are planned until the final PCR document is approved. EPDs represent another important step in the continuous process of advancing the sustainability profile of resilient flooring products and is complementary to the work by manufacturers to certify products to ANSI/NSF 332, the resilient flooring sustainability assessment standard. While certification to ANSI/NSF 332 involves a point system to obtain different levels of certification, there are no credits or points in an EPD but simply a disclosure of the environmental impacts of a product reported in accordance with the PCR. |