Page 77 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

72 4. Life cycle sustainability assessment: An ongoing journey

In 2013, the European Commission launched the draft of its OEF Guide, (European Com-
mission, 2013) and 1 year later, ISO/TS 14072 (ISO, 2014) had been developed by the Inter-
national Organization for Standardization. According to Finkbeiner and K€ onig (2013),
most of the ISO 14044 (2006b) requirements (27 out of 31) can be usefully transferred from
products to organizations. UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative started the project about
O-LCA of definition exploring how to concern organizations in a wide LCA approach,
representing an important milestone also in an LCSA development (UNEP, 2015).

4.3.4 Eco-efficiency and environmental product declaration (EPD) as a
standardization tool for companies

Eco-efficiency analysis, conceived by the World Business Council for Sustainable Develop-
ment (WBCSD, 2011), can be defined as “a management philosophy that encourages business
to search for environmental improvements that yield parallel economic benefits.” It is based
on an actual and effective approach, supporting organizations to incorporate environmental
and social issues into their procedures, actions, and policies.
Eco-efficiency can be considered as a tool for quantifying the relationship between eco-
nomic value creation, social aspects, and environmental impacts, throughout the entire life
cycle of a product. Thanks to this definition, it the robust relationship and similarity with
LCSA seems to be clear. In that way, LCSA standardization can take advantage of the con-
solidated and well-known eco-efficiency methodology and standardization. ISO 14045
(2012) defined a standard for product systems describing principles, requirements and guide-
lines for eco-efficiency assessment. The Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) can be con-
sidered, in a certainly way, a sort of specific application of LCA. While the overall goal of an
EPD is to provide information about the environmental impacts of products, at the same time
it can be considered as a standardization tool to quantify the total impacts of a product or a
system (Del Borghi, 2013).
Specific standards are available for environmental labels and declarations based on a
whole life cycle approach. The International Standards Organization (ISO) classified existing
environmental labels into three typologies—types I, II, and III—and specified the preferential
principles and procedures for each one of them (ISO 14021, ISO 14024, and ISO 14025). An
Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), also referred to as type III environmental decla-
ration, is a standardized (ISO 14025, 2010) and LCA-based tool to communicate the environ-
mental performance of a product (Grahl and Schmincke, 2007). There are a number of
requirements for how the LCA should be performed to be used as basis for an EPD. That ap-
proach can be usefully extended considering an LCSA, adding cost and social assessment to
environmental impact evaluation.
The EPD methodology can represent a guideline, concerning specific definition in terms of
production modeling, kind of data, and data collection methods, indicators. With the aim to
reach outcomes comparability between products, all requirements should be correctly de-
fined and referred to product category rules (ISO 14025), which are documents providing
guidelines for developing an EPD for a specific product category. In that way, EPD becomes
a useful tool also to communicate results and details on products’ performances.