Tag Archives: Environmental Product Declarations

Why EPDs Matter & How You Can Incorporate Them Into Your Business

While Life Cycle Assesments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) have become increasingly important, they are often portrayed as complex programs that are difficult to understand. In turn, the Global Products Alliance is taking steps to make these processes more user friendly. As we become more sophisticated in our understanding of environmental sustainability, the need for transparency becomes more important than ever. Environmental impacts are complex and LCAs that measure those impacts are necessarily complex too. EPD is a tool that takes the complex results of an LCA and creates an easy to understand and transparent summary. The Global Products Alliance is taking steps to make EPDs more accessible to the manufacturers and purchasers.

InterfaceFLOR wants people to know about the impacts of their products and EPDs have given us a credible way to share this information. We want purchasers to be aware of the effect their decisions have on the environment and to use this information to make good product management and purchasing decisions.

Who is the Global Products Alliance?

The Green Standard President and CEO Deborah Dunning formed the Global Products Alliance at a recent forum on The New Way to Define Green co-hosted by TGS with the Institute for Construction & the Environment in Germany. The forum included leaders from education, government and industry and was held at the headquarters of the American Institute of Architects in Washington D.C.

The primary goals of The Green Standard Global Products Alliance are threefold:

1. Create a special website providing the best available information on resources available to manufacturers and purchasers of products on LCAs and EPDs

2. Develop monthly webinars for Alliance members featuring core principles and their practical application in diverse types of building projects

3. Plan an annual forum on The New Way to Define Green to bring together diverse shareholders to learn about new and profitable resources

Want to learn more? Attend Our Free Webinar

The Green Standard’s Global Products Alliance is providing a webinar “Developing and Using LCA-based Environmental Product Declarations to Increase Brand Value”. It is a great opportunity to learn more about EPDs and how they are defining best practices in the green building sector. Register here.

The webinar will include a discussion of the types of ecolabels currently in the market and explain how EPDs are unique, how they’re created and their key characteristics and value.

To learn more about InterfaceFLOR’s EPD initiative read the case study by Five Winds International or join the webinar on July 20, 2010.

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Posted on July 14, 2010

Turn Fiber into Fiber

As a sustainability specialist, I often find myself giving presentations on how to choose environmentally-responsible finishes, including carpet. At some point, I like to ask my audience, “Where does carpet come from?” I push until someone nails the answer: oil. (Or, as I like to show in my slides, plastic sheep!)

Looking at the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) footprint of carpet tile, extracting and processing oil to create nylon dominates the environmental impacts. When we tally and analyze the environmental impacts from every phase of a carpet tile’s life (raw material extraction and processing, manufacturing, installation and use, transportation, and end of life recycling or disposal), the majority of impacts occur in that first phase of turning oil into nylon. In fact, our 3rd party verified Environmental Product Declaration (EPD®) confirms our own LCA, showing how across all environmental impact categories, more than 60% of the impacts occur in the extraction of raw materials.

What does this mean to a company like InterfaceFLOR? It means that using oil to make nylon is unsustainable. Not just because of the LCA footprint, but also because oil is a non-renewable resource and creates social, environmental, and financial instability. We know that we can’t continue along our society’s status quo of take-make-waste, and knowing which of our raw materials is doing the most damage means knowing which raw material we need to replace. To meet our Mission Zero™ goal, we must replace virgin nylon with a renewable resource.

For years, InterfaceFLOR has been working towards completely closing the loop on our carpet tile backing, but the missing link was how to recycle nylon, at least until 2007…

In 2007, InterfaceFLOR cracked the nut by uncovering a method to cleanly separate the carpet nylon from the backing, allowing us to introduce the first post-consumer content type 6,6 nylon carpet tile in the world. In 2009, we introduced post-consumer content type 6 nylon. We use this recycled fiber as a raw material to make our Convert™ carpet tile designs. The styles in the Convert Platform contain a total of 64-73% recycled content including 32-35% post-consumer recycled content (as of September 2009). Check out our EPD for 3rd-party verification of the reduced environmental impacts associated with these products.

InterfaceFLOR invested in an entire system that addresses both the raw material impacts as well as the end of life impacts of our products. Our recycled content isn’t from another industry; it’s drawing from our own history of products that we (and our competitors) made in years past. Using our own product as a raw material for making new product is a major breakthrough for us and the carpet industry. This is what “closing the loop” is truly about, and it moves us closer to our goal of getting off oil.

Lindsay James

Director of Strategic Sustainability

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Posted on November 12, 2009