Our company wants to make sustainability more of a priority moving forward and I’ve been put in charge of researching sustainable practices. I’m just now learning about this alphabet of documents, namely EPDs, LCAs, and PCRs. Can you please help me wrap my head around it all?

It truly can be a lot of information to take in when you’re newer to incorporating sustainability practices, such as the lifecycle tools that you mention above: Environmental Product Declarations, Life Cycle Assessments, and Product Category Rules.

First, let’s rearrange the list above so they are in the correct process order. PCRs are the first ones created, which then lead to LCAs and ultimately EPDs. Let’s spend this time focusing more on PCRs to get you started and briefly touch on the other two to provide a quick background for your research.

A PCR is a standardized set of guidelines that define how to measure and report the environmental impact of products within a specific product category. PCRs establish consistent methodologies for conducting LCAs and reporting environmental impacts in EPDs, ensuring comparisons between similar products are fair and reliable. These guidelines must align with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards 14025 Environmental labels and declarations and ISO 21930 Sustainability in buildings and civil engineering works – Core rules for environmental product declarations of construction products and services.

If a manufacturer wants to assess its product’s environmental impacts, the PCR informs them what data needs to be included, for example, extraction and energy use metrics, and what impact categories to measure, such as carbon emissions and water usage. The PCR ensures that data is collected and impacts are reported in a standardized manner.The guidelines and methodologies in the PCR are then used to perform an LCA, which is an analytical tool for evaluating the environmental impacts of products across their life cycle. The EPD communicates the LCA results in a standardized format for transparency and decision-making and is third-party verified.These lifecycle tools can be industry average results created by a trade association, such as the Gypsum Association or can be created by a company for its specific products.

The GA recently updated the industry Part B Product Category Rules for Gypsum Panels. This PCR will be used to create an LCA and EPD for gypsum panels, updating the previous documents from cradle-to-gate to cradle-to-grave. More information on PCRs, LCAs, and EPDs can be found on the Gypsum Association website.

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