The construction industry has been identified as a key sector for reducing emission levels in Europe. In order to meet new requirements for greenhouse gas accounting and life cycle assessments, NorDan is launching a dynamic EPD generator. Specifically, this means that it will eventually be possible to deliver project-specific climate documentation, which will be increasingly in demand in the future.
Leading in documentation
An EPD is an independently verified environmental declaration based on a life cycle assessment. In addition to describing the expected lifespan, an EPD for a window provides detailed data on greenhouse gas emissions for the different phases of the window's life cycle: from raw materials, production, and transport to when the window is installed in a building and eventually recycled.
«Normally, this data is collected in a static document, but it is only when we release the data in an EPD generator that we can truly exploit the possibilities that lie in better data» said Johannes Rasmussen, Director of Marketing at NorDan Group.
«Thanks to a long-term and strategic commitment to building solid basic data about our products, we have been able to take a leading position in environmental declarations among door and window manufacturers," he said
Environmental data on demand
Fredrik Jonsson at NorDan's Competence Center for Environmental Documentation and Digitization has led the development of the EPD generator. The work has been carried out in close collaboration with LCA.no and TreTeknisk, and the generator itself has been published through EPD Norway.
«The biggest task will always be to map the components of the products in as much detail as possible. Once that is in place, it is more a matter of carrying out calculations and having these calculations reviewed and approved by a third party," he says, describing some of the possibilities the generator offers for new use of environmental data.
«Initially, we will be able to reduce the time it takes to produce emission declarations from six months to just a couple of weeks. The integration with NorDan's quotation and ordering system allows us to generate project-specific environmental declarations in a very short time, all based on the same approved EPDs," Jonsson said.
