Tobias Brinkmann, Susanne Köh­ler, Alexan­der Boeth and Lukas Met­zger from brands & val­ues GmbH exam­ine the ben­e­fits, expec­ta­tions and ful­fil­ment of envi­ron­men­tal prod­uct dec­la­ra­tions in the first part of a study pub­lished in February.

blankLast year, a stake­hold­er sur­vey involv­ing more than 100 par­tic­i­pants — includ­ing many IBU mem­bers — exam­ined the ben­e­fits, expec­ta­tions and ful­fil­ment of EPDs. The results of the sur­vey have now been pub­lished in the two-part study “Envi­ron­men­tal Prod­uct Dec­la­ra­tions — Ben­e­fits, Expec­ta­tions and Ful­fil­ments — A Stake­hold­er View”. The results show that the ben­e­fits of EPDs are pre­dom­i­nant­ly assessed pos­i­tive­ly. Nev­er­the­less, opti­miza­tion poten­tials are seen in the more than 20 iden­ti­fied ben­e­fit cat­e­gories, since in almost every ben­e­fit dimen­sion the expec­ta­tions are high­er than the actu­al ful­fil­ment. This is main­ly due to the fact that EPDs and LCAs are not prop­er­ly under­stood and exist­ing knowl­edge about them is insuf­fi­cient. Thus, a self-explana­to­ry pur­pose of the first part of the study, in addi­tion to sum­maris­ing the most impor­tant results, is to pre­pare the basics and most impor­tant ques­tions on the sub­ject of EPDs.

The study can be request­ed free of charge from the fol­low­ing address: https://www.brandsandvalues.com/study1-epd-environmentalproductdecl

Part 2 of the study dis­cuss­es the pos­si­bil­i­ties to increase the poten­tial ben­e­fits of EPDs. The pub­li­ca­tion is sched­uled for spring 2019.