EPD can be published as translation to several languages, but the publication needs to be done either in Finnish or in English.

The publication fee is the only fee that you pay to Building Information Ltd for the publication of an EPD. The EPD is valid for five years (pre-EPD is for one and half year). There are no annual fees or similar continuous charges. If the data changes so much that it needs reapproval from the technical committee, there is a charge on that.

It is possible to report more than one product with one EPD. This can be done either with several result tables or with a set of scaling factors (for example different dimensions of the same material). If there are several products in one EPD, the readability can suffer, and one choice is to publish more than one EDP document from the same study and background report. If you are wondering, please, contact us at epd@rakennustieto.fi .

Cases where for example there are changes in the process equipment, raw material or energy source (for example from national average to green energy) that change the GWP total A1-A3 is more than ±10 % (as said in the EN 15804: “An EPD shall only be reassessed and updated as necessary to reflect changes in technology or other circumstances that could alter the content and accuracy of the declaration”). In these cases, there might be several changes in the indicator tables, but the validity dates remain the same and it is considered as one approval in the technical committee.

cases where for example theamount of recycled material changes in raw material (as said in the EN 15804: “An EPD shall only be reassessed and updated as necessary to reflect changes in technology or other circumstances that could alter the content and accuracy of the declaration”). In these cases, there might be several changes in the indicator tables, but the validity dates remain the same and it is considered as one approval in the technical committee.

During the five years validity time there can happen a lot. For example new contact persons and contact details, changes in company or product names. This type of update is done free of charge, at the moment.

 If the products are from the same production site and the differences are quite small between the products, you have some options. 
a)     The first option of grouping is that you calculate and declare an average of the products. This way the allocation for example electricity on the production and the amount of side products is minimal, sometimes those are measurable only at the production line or even at the site level (A1-A3 GWP total needs to be within ±10 % in this case).
b)     The second option would be to choose a representative product and calculate all production by that and state in the EPD the reason this has been selected (for example ‘this product is XX % of all production’). This already needs some more allocations, and the results should be within ±10 %. 
c)  One possible option could be to use the worst-case of all products (by selecting the worst values for each indicator), this can also include higher variation of results.

EPD can follow graphical guidelines of company or from the tool. The contents of the EPD are defined in the standard and in the PCR document, but the graphical design can be chosen freely. Sometimes the EPD goes through graphical design after it has been approved to be published.