Following on from my 2017 EPD Infographic,  I have again tracked the numbers of verified EPD for construction products aligning to EN 15804. Growth in numbers has continued, and there are now over 5000 EPD available globally.  In 2017, new EPD programmes were launched in Ireland, India and Belgium, and the well established programmes, IBU in Germany, International EPD^®, and EPD Norge in Norway all showed significant increases in numbers of EPD. The PEPecopassport EPD programme, which covers HVAC and electrical equipment used in buildings, has also shown strong growth.  As this scheme is for electrical products rather than construction products, it is covered by CEN ELEC rather than CEN and does not use EN 15804 as an normative standard, however it aligns very closely with EN 15804 in terms of methodology and has been considered as compliant here.  In the Netherlands, the MRPI scheme has now made some of its recent EPD available publicly, accounting for the rapid increase here.  EPD which have not been published (as per ISO 14025) and made available to download (for example some MRPI and the Tata Steel EPD) have not been included in this study.

Drivers for the growth in EPD continue to be diverse, including:

• Credits within Sustainable Building Assessment schemes such as BREEAM and LEED
• Legislation in France and Belgium, requiring EPD to support environmental claims about construction products
• The need for EPD to support building level life cycle assessment (LCA), which is increasing required by legislation, for example in the Netherlands for new housing and offices and Germany for public buildings, or credited within voluntary schemes such HQE, DGNB, LEED v4, HPI in Ireland or GreenStar in Australia. The EU Level(s) scheme also aims to increase the focus on building LCA.