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There are a number of different ways to calculate the environmental impacts of materials: in the construction industry we use the EN 15804 as a European-wide standard,  but each country can make its own adjustments and still be working according to this standard’s rules. This is annoying and costly for international operating manufacturers. The CAPEM (Cycle Assessment Procedure for Eco-impacts of Materials, an Interreg IVB project) group has worked to resolve this issue.

Environmental product declarations (EPD) are used to communicate the environmental impact of building products. In Europe we make them according to the EN 15804 standard, but the information required in EPDs is different in some countries (for example the request for impacts related to indoor air quality in France, the request for additional impact categories in Belgium from 2017, and the request to use specific end-of-life calculation rules in the Netherlands). Due to these differences, EPDs still cannot be compared and are not accepted in all European countries. This makes it very expensive and time-consuming for manufacturers whose building products are available throughout Europe.

CAPEM has worked on a solution to this problem. The CAPEM project has made the first real attempt to reduce the costs for manufacturers. This is particularly important to SMEs. Due to the strong international partnership in the CAPEM team, we were able to pinpoint the differences between the national standards and draw some default scenarios for the specific countries to calculate the impacts from ‘cradle to gate’ and ‘gate to grave’. The core document for the CAPEM Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method is also the European standard EN 15804. In the ‘Rules and Procedures for CAPEM EPD’ document, more clarifications and guidelines are provided on the following issues:
• Defining the functional unit for several construction products using a functional unit matrix;
• Overview of demands and databases in different countries on reference service life and theoretical lifespan;
• Overview of which lifecycle stages shall be declared in EPDs in different countries;
• Overview of available default scenarios for lifecycle stages A4 to C4 in different countries; and
• Overview of which impact categories and additional parameters shall be declared in EPDs in different countries.

The ‘Rules and Procedures for CAPEM EPD’ document provides a straightforward method to make LCAs and EPDs for building products compliant in four northwest European countries all from one action. This leads to an enormous cost and time reduction for manufacturers operating in this area.

Two other developments the CAPEM group is following are the ECO Platform initiative and the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF). The objective of ECO Platform is the acceptance of verified environmental information for construction products from various sources and countries, in particular EPDs (also called type III declarations). The added value of EPDs under the ECO Platform framework is the possibility to use these declarations in all European countries, as well as international markets. Until now there has only been one agreement on cradle-to-gate EPD; the difference with the CAPEM method is that it can provide cradle to grave.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Environment is developing the PEF: this LCA-derived method aims to provide customers with information on the environmental impact of all kind of materials and products in a harmonised way. At the moment several pilots are testing this method; CAPEM is leading one of them.

The CAPEM team is represented in France (cd2e), Belgium (VIBE), the UK (NGS and Renuables) and the Netherlands (Agrodome). Go to www.capem.eu to contact a member of the CAPEM team and find more information.

Fred van der Burgh
Stichting Agrodome
Veerstraat 122
6701 DZ Wageningen
tel: +31 317427570
www.agrodome.nl
www.capem.eu
www.greendealbouwen.nl