The letters “EPD” have started turning up in more specification documents, tender checklists and green-building requirement sheets for electrical installation boxes — often with no explanation of what the document behind the acronym actually contains, or does not. Three of our own product families now carry one, independently verified, so it is worth explaining exactly what that means before the term gets treated as a marketing badge rather than a technical document.

What an EPD actually is

An Environmental Product Declaration is a standardised report of a product’s life-cycle environmental impact, prepared under a fixed methodology — EN 15804+A2 or EN 50693 in our case, both aligned with ISO 14025 — and checked by an independent verifier before it is published. It is not a self-graded sustainability score or a pass/fail certificate. It is closer to a nutrition label: a defined set of measured figures, calculated the same way every time, so that one declaration can be read against the methodology rather than against a marketing claim.

GWP-fossil and GWP-total are not the same number

Most of the attention lands on Global Warming Potential, but an EPD actually reports two related figures for it. GWP-fossil is the carbon footprint attributable to fossil energy and fossil material sources. GWP-total adds biogenic carbon flows and land-use-change effects on top of that. The two numbers are close for a plastic product like an installation box, but they answer slightly different questions, and a specification that asks for one should not be answered with the other without saying so.

Third-party verification is the part that actually matters

The manufacturer prepares the underlying life-cycle data — bill of materials, energy use, transport distances, end-of-life assumptions — but the declaration itself is checked by an independent verifier acting for the program operator, in our case EPD Hub, before it can be published. That verification step is what separates an EPD from an internal carbon estimate: a verifier who was not involved in the original calculation has to independently confirm it follows the stated standard before it becomes a public document.

What our own declarations show

Three product families in our range currently carry a verified EPD:

Note the declared unit changes between families — one unit for the general flush-mounting box, one kilogram for the concrete and prefab families — which is exactly the kind of detail that gets lost if a figure is quoted without its unit. The full breakdown, including GWP-total, energy use and validity dates, is on our Environmental Data and Carbon Footprint page.

What an EPD does not tell you

An EPD is not a comparison tool. The underlying standards state explicitly that declarations from different manufacturers, different product categories or different verification programs are not directly comparable, even when the units look similar. A lower GWP-fossil figure on one document does not automatically mean a lower-carbon product than a competitor’s — the two may have been calculated with different system boundaries, different data sources or a different declared unit. Treat an EPD as evidence for a compliance file, not as a marketing comparison chart.

Requesting the current certificate

Each EPD carries a validity window and applies to a defined model or representative case within a family, not automatically to every model in that family. If a project needs the current certificate for a compliance file, tell us the model or product family and the destination market and we will confirm which declaration applies.

Environmental data and carbon footprint → · Request a quote →