SUSTAINABILITY
EPDS: A USEFUL TOOL FOR MERCHANTS
BMJ explores Enivronmental Product Declarations, how they benefit users, and what merchants need to know.
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n a world where sustainability has become a priority, everyone has a responsibility to reduce the carbon footprint of our buildings and contribute to Net Zero. For merchants, that can mean suggesting products that offer greener credentials, especially when a customer’s brief centres around sustainability. The challenge, however, is that the market is full of sustainability claims, some robust, others far less so. Jonathan Lynch, UK Building Products Manager at EGGER UK, explains: “This greenwashing creates confusion for merchants and customers alike, making it harder to understand what is truly ‘green’. “Much of this responsibility lies on manufacturers, and the most responsible among them are committing to full transparency, not just marketing sustainability, but proving it with accessible and traceable data. This is where EPDs show their value.”
What are EPDs?
An EPD acts like a nutrition label for building materials, providing objective, transparent and third-party verified information about the environmental performance of a product or service throughout its life cycle. The demand for EPDs has rapidly increased, and they are widely expected to become a core requirement
Going in fabric first
The cold conditions experienced by many parts of the UK earlier this year act as a reminder of the importance of ensuring the fabric of a building is thermally efficient before specifying renewables.
With snow lying thick on the ground across large parts of Great Britain in January and February, combined with news that 2025 was a record year for renewables, it’s a timely reminder that the key to an energy efficient home lies in prioritising its fabric. While strategic use of renewable energy sources is vital as we move towards net zero, Harsha Mistry, technical manager at insulation manufacturer Actis, says initial focus must go on adopting the ‘fabric first’ approach and ensuring the structure is thermally efficient to
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in specification decisions, placing greater importance on merchants being confident in explaining and navigating them.
“EPDs give specifiers a clear, independently verified breakdown of a product’s environmental impact,” Lynch continues, “from the raw materials used, to how they are manufactured, transported, installed and eventually disposed of. This allows them to compare products on a like-for-like basis and make more informed specification decisions. In turn, merchants can use EPDs to help sell a product, with the increased transparency they provide a strong selling point.”
Universal vs product-specific There are several types of EPDs that merchants are likely to come across. Some are more general and cover a broader mix of products. For example, Industry Average EPDs bring together data from multiple manufacturers to show the environmental profile of a typical product within a category. Group EPDs, on the other hand, cover a manufacturer’s wider product family under one declaration. These documents are still valid and independently verified, but because they draw on pooled or averaged data, provide only a general overview rather than the environmental
performance of any individual product. By contrast, product specific EPDs focus on one defined product and how it is actually made. This level of detail is increasingly valued by specifiers and by schemes such as BREEAM and LEED, which often give greater recognition to product level data due to its accuracy and relevance to whole building carbon assessments.
Lynch comments: “when a customer is working to particular environmental targets, it’s worth looking for products that come with a product specific EPD. It gives specifiers the precise information they need and helps ensure the product is suitable for projects with tighter sustainability requirements.”
The future of the industry EPDs play a pivotal role in the move towards a more sustainable and eco-friendly future. By providing transparency and comparability, they can help specifiers make more informed decisions about the type of products they use on their projects.
Merchants can set themselves apart by understanding this information, purchasing products with strong ‘green’ credentials, and using that insight to give customers clearer, more informed advice. BMJ
nation’s electricity and solar panels six per cent. The figures exclude Northern Ireland. “This is obviously to be welcomed,“ says Mistry. “But energy efficiency standards should always be based on reducing the need for energy first and in particular limiting the heat loss through thermal elements – that is through achieving excellent U-values, reducing thermal bridging and improving air tightness – the fabric first principle. This will need to be combined with more use of efficient building technologies.
minimise heat loss in the first place. Provisional figures issued by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) show renewable energy produced a record amount of electricity in England, Scotland and Wales in 2025, with wind generating nearly 30 per cent of the
“Ensuring insulation is continuous, with no gaps, plays a vital role in reducing thermal bridging – and this is one area in which the Actis Hybrid range and our two-in-one Eolis HC excel, with their flexible nature and ease of cutting and moulding into corners, gaps and awkward junctions.” BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net March 2026
SUSTAINABILITY
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