Quote: EPDs Now 'Standard, Not Exception'
Specifiers are no longer treating Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) as a bonus, but as a baseline requirement. According to a sustainability lead at a major lighting consultancy quoted this week, "Specifiers want EPDs as standard, not exception." Lifecycle assessment tools and end-of-life takeback programs are now baseline expectations for premium projects.
The push for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) is driven by a larger movement towards Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) in construction, which evaluate a building's total environmental impact, from raw material extraction to demolition. This holistic approach is becoming a baseline in the industry as regulations tighten and clients demand greater transparency and sustainability. The construction and manufacturing sectors together are responsible for 57% of global carbon emissions. Third-party verified EPDs provide standardized, credible data that architects and designers use to select more sustainable materials and comply with green building certifications like LEED and BREEAM. For LEED v4.1, for example, using at least 20 products with EPDs from five different manufacturers can earn points toward certification. BREEAM integrates EPD data into a broader whole-building life cycle assessment to award credits. In the lighting industry, the complexity of LED products initially slowed the adoption of EPDs, but industry groups like the GreenLight Alliance are now developing standardized EPDs. Major manufacturers like Signify have already made thousands of EPDs available, covering tens of thousands of product variations to meet customer demand and substantiate their sustainability claims. This move helps benchmark products and identify "hot spots" in a product's life cycle to improve environmental performance. While operational carbon from a luminaire's energy use over its lifetime has traditionally been the main focus, embodied carbon is gaining attention. EPDs provide the necessary data to calculate and reduce the initial environmental impact of manufacturing. This aligns with a growing trend where specifiers are looking beyond just energy efficiency (lumens per watt) to consider the full environmental cost of a product. The emphasis on lifecycle thinking extends to a product's end-of-life. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes legally require manufacturers to fund and manage the collection and recycling of their products. In Europe, Collection and Recycling Service Organizations (CRSOs) work to ensure that materials from lamps and luminaires are recovered and reused, with over 80% of materials from lamps being reusable after treatment. This shift is creating a move toward a circular economy in lighting, with organizations like Recolight in the UK promoting the repair and reuse of fixtures over just recycling. Frameworks like CIBSE's TM66 provide a method for assessing a product's circular economy performance, giving specifiers a tool to compare products on more than just their initial environmental impact. This focus on repairability and remanufacturing is becoming a key consideration for specifiers.
