It’s never been a more exciting time to be involved with Environmental Product Declarations.
For a start, greenwashing is on its deathbed.
While it is still a widely practiced problem, it now often causes more harm to the business doing it, hence why there’s a trend toward ‘green hushing’ too.
Both greenwashing & green hushing are symptoms of the same problem: a severe shortage of clear and credible information about environmental impacts.
There are more than 230 eco labels in use across the EU, many of which are self-declared or entirely self-awarded.
Consumers and B2B buyers are tired of vacuous eco marketing.So regulations, especially in Europe, are finally starting to treat sustainability as a set of product characteristics that deserve the same level of accuracy as any other testable product claim, like calories in food, for example.
From the Green Claims Directive to the Construction Products Regulation, the direction of travel is clear.
We’re entering an era in which transparent (independently verified) data about environmental impacts can be the only basis for selling ‘sustainability’ and winning contracts that increasingly have to factor it in.
This change will come gradually, then suddenly.
And the market has a huge card up its sleeve to accelerate this.
Consumers and procurement teams are just starting to get access to AI tools that help make better buying decisions.
For all of us, it’ll be easier than ever before to make more efficient purchasing decisions based on a wider range of complex criteria - including environmental impacts.
For manufacturers, this is the last chance to be an early adopter of EPDs and gain the competitive advantages that come with that, including earlier identification of ways to improve efficiency.
Embracing transparency around environmental impacts also means you can talk authentically about how you’re improving - which I think buyers appreciate more than when you market yourself as saving the planet.
For EPD practitioners, we’ve also got to get our house in order fast.
EPDs are growing in quantity, but too often at the expense of quality. There are issues we’ve got to focus on fixing together to build a more robust system and ensure EPDs can be at the heart of this new era. And EPDs must be more easily machine-readable by AI tools.
So next week will be pivotal as we meet for ECO Conference and General Assembly 2025 in Brussels, organised by ECO Platform. Digitalising EPDs will be a huge focus.
I’ll be there with my LCA Support colleagues, Kirke Maria Lepik & Marianne Aru, and look forward to discussing all this with our fast growing EPD community.
AI will inevitably be a tool on our side too in order to raise quality at scale so I especially look forward to sharing our plans for that.
None of these challenges will be simple, but I do think this is all exciting!