IBU sup­ports tran­si­tion to new EPD stan­dard with attrac­tive pricing

The new Euro­pean stan­dard EN 15804+A2 reg­u­lat­ing EPDs for con­struc­tion prod­ucts will have par­tic­u­lar impacts on the impact assess­ment stage; there­fore, it will be impos­si­ble to com­pare EPD results with those accord­ing to the pre­vi­ous ver­sion EN 15804+A1. In order to offer all dec­la­ra­tion own­ers an effi­cient and effec­tive solu­tion for the long tran­si­tion peri­od of 3 years, IBU has devel­oped an attrac­tive pric­ing mod­el; it ful­ly pass­es on the con­sid­er­able syn­er­gies from a par­al­lel EPD cal­cu­la­tion using both the old and new stan­dards. This allows pro­duc­ers of pro­duc­tion prod­ucts to always sat­is­fy all requests for EPDs.

The new stan­dard EN 15804+A2 is expect­ed for fall 2019 and will bring a num­ber of fun­da­men­tal changes for EPDs of con­struc­tion prod­ucts. Prob­a­bly the most vis­i­ble of these changes is the manda­to­ry con­sid­er­a­tion of mod­ules C (end of life) and D (ben­e­fits and loads beyond the sys­tem bound­ary) which are still option­al in EN 15804+A1. In addi­tion, new char­ac­ter­i­za­tion fac­tors and some­times even com­plete­ly new mod­els will be used for the so-called impact assess­ment, i.e. the aggre­ga­tion of all the data about emis­sions and resource use into rel­a­tive­ly few indi­ca­tors. The lat­ter is the rea­son why results from an EPD fol­low­ing the new stan­dard can in no way be com­pared to those obtained fol­low­ing the old standard.

Con­sid­er­ing the excep­tion­al­ly long tran­si­tion peri­od of 3 years this cre­ates a dilem­ma for all pro­duc­ers that want to pre­pare a new EPD or update an exist­ing one: If they go for the new stan­dard their EPD will have lim­it­ed val­ue in the begin­ning as there will not be enough com­pa­ra­ble datasets for the cal­cu­la­tion of a com­plete life-cycle assess­ment of a build­ing. If, how­ev­er, they pub­lish an EPD fol­low­ing the old stan­dard there is a seri­ous risk that this EPD will soon become obso­lete. Adding to the com­plex­i­ty is that for the time being there are no robust esti­mates as to when there will be a crit­i­cal mass of EPDs fol­low­ing A2 – from that moment onwards this will be the stan­dard to select.

The per­fect solu­tion for both pro­duc­ers and users would be to pub­lish two EPDs in the tran­si­tion peri­od – one EPD fol­low­ing the old, one fol­low­ing the new stan­dard. There­fore, IBU offers an attrac­tive pric­ing mod­el: for a small addi­tion­al fee it allows its mem­bers to get a ver­i­fi­ca­tion of EPDs fol­low­ing both EN 15804+A1 and EN 15804+A2. This solu­tion enables own­ers of EPDs to sat­is­fy all requests from clients and planners.