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U.S. hardwood industry encourages decisive move towards Environmental Product Declarations.

 

The American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), the leading international trade association for the American hardwood industry, has commended the move towards Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). The announcement highlights the importance of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study currently being undertaken by leading LCA Consultants, PE International and reflects AHEC’s confidence that EPDs will soon be widely recognized as an essential standard across leading building rating systems. AHEC has also highlighted the need to increase awareness of the significance of EPDs. A major international effort will be made to ensure that EPDs are recognized as key in the material selection process of the global construction industry.

AHEC has begun to address this issue in the wood sector through the LCA study project launched at the end of last year. The project aims to promote the compilation and use of EPDs in line with international standards by European and Asian joinery and furniture manufacturers of hardwood-based products. The results of the LCA can offer lessons for other suppliers to the building sector, like those coming from the concrete, paints and steel segments. EPD’s, which can be defined as third-party verified eco-labels showing the environmental performance of products, are similar to a nutrition label disclosing nutritional product value and can be prepared by leading industry associations for generic products (i.e. American red oak lumber) or also by companies for specific product lines.

“The development of EPDs is a response from the confusion that arises from the wide variety of environmental claims made by material suppliers, some may be genuine while some may just be downright bogus,” said Roderick Wiles, AHEC Director for Africa, Middle East, India and Oceania. “The last few years has seen the emergence of a wide array of labelling systems, many of these systems only certifying a small part of the material supply chain, which in reality may have only a marginal impact on the overall environmental footprint of a product. The development of EPDs is also a strong response to a criticism of building rating systems like LEED, which allocate environmental credits to construction materials in an uncoordinated way on the basis of single attributes and in turn produces inconsistent results.”

Wiles explained that a building rating system like LEED credits ‘regional materials,’ defined as those harvested and processed or extracted and processed within 500 miles of the project, despite the LCA study showing that transport contributes only a relatively small proportion to the overall environmental footprint of most materials.

Similarly, the LEED credit for 'rapidly renewable' materials cannot be justified on environmental grounds, sending out the wrong signal with respect to competing land uses. It implies that it is environmentally appropriate to remove forests managed on a long rotation for timber over the short-rotation agricultural crops.

AHEC has pointed out that the development of EPDs can overcome these problems by delivering information on the full environmental impact of a material or product across its entire life cycle. Furthermore, EPDs help to ensure that efforts to reduce one impact do not result in environmental degradation elsewhere. International standards have been developed to ensure that the information provided in EPDs is comparable and that environmental assessments are performed in the same way and yield the same results no matter who does the analysis.

The requirements for LCA have been specified in the ISO 14040 series of standards and include rules for stakeholder consultation and peer review ensuring credibility. Meanwhile, the requirements for EPDs can be found in ISO 14025 series, which requires a program of Product Category Rules (PCRs) on how to perform the LCA across specific sectors. Also, the basic requirements for PCRs for building products can be found in the ISO 21930 series.

“The use of EPDs is expanding rapidly across Europe where they provide the foundation for all the leading green building rating systems like DGNB (Germany), BREEAM (UK and the Netherlands) and HQE (France). We are now seeing developments in according due recognition to the importance of EPDs. In fact, CEN, the European Standards Institute, is now preparing standards for developing EPDs in assessing the environmental impact of whole buildings for the European market.

This move also follows the European Union’s (EU) proposal to require mandatory provision of basic EPDs for all products requiring CE Marking. Further, France has also started a mandatory requirement for EPDs for all consumer goods. These developments have given us the confidence that EPDs will soon be followed as a standard for internationally accepted building rating systems,” concluded Wiles.

A key factor in preparing EPDs for the hardwood segment lies in analyzing the sustainability of the source. Forests are considered as carbon sinks, which is a natural or artificial reservoir that accumulates and stores carbon-containing chemical compounds over indefinite periods. Under EPD programmes and carbon footprint standards, wood products can be credited with carbon storage only if they derive from a renewable source where growth exceeds harvest. As such, the AHEC LCA study covers a detailed analysis of U.S. government forest inventory data gathered at regular intervals over the last 60 years.

This shows that the volume of hardwood standing in U.S. forests has increased by more than 100 per cent, from 5.2 billion m3 to 11.4 billion m3 between 1952 and 2007. Due to very low levels of hardwood forest utilization, U.S. hardwood supply is expected to see an increase in harvests from current levels of less than 100 million m3 to an excess of 250 million m3 over the next 40 years without threatening long term sustainability. Furthermore, analysis of hardwood growth and removals indicates strong potential to significantly increase the supply of most American hardwood species, with particularly strong potential in soft maple, tulipwood, red oak, white oak, ash, hickory, and hard maple.