We produce Environmental Product Declarations and life cycle assessments for manufacturers and the consultancies that work with them, and we produce them to a standard that holds up under independent verification.
EPD LCA is a specialist practice life cycle assessment and Environmental Product Declaration production, nothing else. Offering EPDs as one line in a broader service menu wasn't something we were interested in. The LCA field is more methodologically demanding than it looks from the outside. PCRs vary significantly between product types and get updated as programme operators revise them. Background dataset selection requires judgment that comes from doing a lot of these projects. The verification documentation is detailed and specific, and the relationship between practitioner and verifier takes time to develop. These aren't skills you pick up on the side.
Our background is in the European EPD market, working under EN 15804 the European standard for construction product EPDs. Among LCA practitioners internationally, EN 15804 has a reputation as the most methodologically demanding EPD framework in active use. It requires broad environmental impact category coverage, stringent background database transparency, documented justification for every dataset selection, and detailed scenario modelling for end-of-life and beyond-boundary impacts that most US PCR frameworks don't require. Working to that standard across many projects and product categories builds practitioner judgment that typically exceeds what US PCR frameworks ask for. We don't see the European background as a limitation, it's the most useful thing we bring.
We're moving into the US market because the demand for qualified EPD practitioners is outrunning supply. Buy Clean legislation, LEED v4, and the Scope 3 pressure flowing through large corporate supply chains have created more EPD work than experienced practitioners can absorb. We're not entering this market to offer a cheap, templated service, the market has plenty of that already. We're here to do the work properly.
Our approach in the US is built around a delivery partnership model, working with established sustainability, environmental, and engineering consultancies as their specialist EPD partner. It's a good fit for both sides. They have the client relationships and market presence; we bring EPD delivery capability that would take years and significant cost to build internally. We get to develop our US reference portfolio and programme operator relationships. They get to say yes to clients asking about EPDs, starting immediately.
Every piece of work we produce is conducted by practitioners with hands-on EPD delivery experience across multiple product categories and programme operators — not theoretical knowledge applied for the first time.
Core LCA Standards
EPD Frameworks
US Programme Operators
Software & Databases
The most direct evidence of what an EPD practitioner can do isn't a company description or a credentials list, it's published EPDs, independently verified and searchable on programme operator databases. Our EPDs are publicly listed and anyone can look them up. We share references to specific published work in initial conversations with prospective clients and partners. The work makes the case better than we can.
The EPD market is growing quickly, and more practitioners are entering it than have the depth of experience to produce work that holds up. It's worth understanding where the quality of an EPD is actually determined, because the gaps in weak EPD work aren't always visible until they become a problem.
For a moderately complex product, an LCA model involves thirty to sixty background dataset selections, one for each material input, energy source, transport stage, and waste treatment process. Every selection is a judgment call: is the dataset from the right geography? Does it match the actual production technology? Is the data current enough to be representative?
A poor proxy choice, applying a European electricity grid to a US facility, or using a generic concrete dataset for a product with a substantially different mix design, can move a GWP result by 20% or more. These errors don't always come up at verification. Sometimes they just sit in the EPD, misrepresenting actual performance, until someone looks more carefully.
Product Category Rules are detailed, technical documents that govern exactly how an LCA must be conducted for a specific product type, functional unit definition, required lifecycle stages, mandatory and optional impact categories, background database requirements, cut-off rules, and allocation procedures. They are not always unambiguous, and they differ significantly between product categories and programme operators.
Experienced practitioners know where the ambiguities sit in specific PCRs and how verifiers expect them to be resolved. Practitioners without that experience misapply PCRs fairly regularly, producing EPDs that don't comply technically, or that verifiers push back on. Either way, the result is rework that adds weeks and cost to a project where the client had a deadline in mind.
Third-party verification is a review of the complete LCA study, not just the EPD document. The verifier reviews the background report, dataset selection justifications, data quality assessments, cut-off documentation, sensitivity analyses, and the full modelling file. The quality and completeness of this package is the primary determinant of how smoothly and quickly verification proceeds.
Send in a submission with unexplained dataset choices, thin data quality assessments, or gaps in cut-off documentation and you'll get a long list of formal queries back and multiple revision rounds. We build submissions to answer the obvious questions before they're asked, which keeps the project moving and keeps the verifier's workload manageable.
"EPD and LCA consulting is becoming a crucial requirement"
Getting listed on the right platforms is a step that some manufacturers treat as an afterthought — which undermines the value of the whole exercise.
Developed by Building Transparency, EC3 is now the main tool US architects, structural engineers, and contractors use to compare embodied carbon across products. It pulls EPD data from multiple programme operators and presents it in a consistent, searchable format. When a design team is running Buy Clean compliance checks or pulling together a LEED credit submission, this is where they go. A product with a GWP result below a Buy Clean threshold shows up on shortlists; a product without an EC3 listing often doesn't show up at all.
NSF International, UL Environment, and EPD International each run public databases of registered EPDs — the reference point for procurement teams, LEED reviewers, and sustainability assessors. Getting categorised and registered correctly is a required step that occasionally goes wrong when it's handled carelessly, adding delay at the final stage of a project that's been running for months.
Several Buy Clean states require EPD submissions as evidence of compliance with embodied carbon thresholds. Getting your EPD submitted correctly to the relevant state programme — where that applies — is something manufacturers occasionally skip, which makes the original investment considerably less useful.
EPDs expire. Most programme operators set a five-year validity period, after which the EPD needs to be renewed — updated primary data, current background database versions, any PCR revisions incorporated — or it gets withdrawn from the database.
Once it's withdrawn, it's no longer valid for Buy Clean submissions or LEED credit documentation. Manufacturers sometimes let EPDs lapse without noticing — usually because no one was tracking the expiry — and then find themselves without a valid declaration when they need one.
We track the validity of every EPD we produce and contact clients ahead of renewal deadlines. Renewal is typically faster and less costly than the original EPD production, particularly where production processes and material inputs have remained relatively stable.
An EPD represents the environmental profile of a product as manufactured during the reference period of the LCA study — typically a single production year. If a manufacturer subsequently changes their energy supply, raw material sources, or production process materially, the published EPD may no longer accurately represent current production. In such cases, an updated EPD is both methodologically appropriate and commercially important — particularly where the change improves the product's GWP result relative to Buy Clean thresholds or competitor EPDs.
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