Environmental Standard for Product Sustainability

EN 15804:2012+A2:2019 Sustainability of construction works – Environmental product declarations – Core rules for the product category of construction products. 

This is the most important of a group of environmental standards and defines how companies should go about creating an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). The standard sets down:  six core product category rules (PCR); four environmental indicators  and five life cycle stages.

EPDs for US plywood, LVL, OSB and I-joists have been produced to be in line with EN 15804 – download your copies.

Further revisions have been made to the standard which now include:

• Reports now need to include 13 core and 6 additional environmental indicators
• The mass of biogenic carbon in the product and its packaging to be declared
• All background data needs to converted to the format set in the International Reference Life Cycle Data (ILCD) method
• Data quality is to be based on either the UN Environmental Global Guidance on LCA data base development or PEF category rules.

The five other product sustainability standards include:

• EN 15643-1: Sustainability of  construction works – Sustainability assessment of buildings – Part 1: General framework
• EN 15643-2: Sustainability of  construction works – Assessment of buildings – Part 2: Framework for the assessment of environmental performance
• EN 15978: Sustainability of  construction works – Assessment of environmental performance of buildings – Calculation method
• CEN/TR 15941: Sustainability of  construction works – Environmental product declarations – Methodology for the selection and use of generic data
• EN 15942; Sustainability of  construction works – Environmental product declarations – Communication formats: business to business.