June 11, 2025
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4 min read
If an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is your product’s nutrition label, data collection is simply gathering the ingredients and jotting down the measurements.
An Environmental Product Declaration is only as reliable as the data behind it - specifically, the full record of materials, energy, emissions, and waste tracked across the product’s life cycle. Transparent, well-documented primary data reduce modelling uncertainty, support third-party verification, and - since the July 2022 enforcement of EN 15804 +A2 - are increasingly demanded by specifiers and public procurement schemes. The new A2 amendment increases the mandatory impact indicators (from 7 to 13) and tightens reporting rules, so gaps in the inventory show up immediately.
"EPD creation used to be a chaotic, long-term and expensive endeavor. The Emidat EPD tool made the process significantly faster and simpler for us."
- Damiano Della Lunga, R&D Department Manager, Insulation Manufacturer
Lets look at Ready-mix concrete as an example, the following table breaks down the data:
An EPD reports the environmental impact across the product’s entire life cycle - from raw materials to end-of-life - using standardized rules (EN 15804, ISO 14025). To create one, you’ll need data for each (mandatory) life cycle phase (A1-D) to answer one key question: What’s the total environmental impact of this product, from cradle to grave?
Think of primary data as the facts you can measure, meter, or pull straight from a supplier’s EPD; secondary data are the vetted averages you borrow from a database such as ecoinvent or GaBi. Getting the split right keeps your workload realistic and satisfies third-party verifiers under EN 15804.
When in doubt: Measure what’s specific and significant. Leave background processes - like upstream mining or commodity steel - to trusted databases.
Already producing EPDs? You’re most of the way to DPPs! See what carries over and what to add here.
In the next section, we’ll show how Emidat’s three-drawer cabinet design turns that principle into a painless workflow.
Picture your entire life-cycle inventory sorted into three big drawers of the same cabinet - each one labelled Plant, Supplier, or Product. Open the right drawer, drop your numbers in once, and Emidat re-uses them automatically wherever they belong. No more copy-paste, no more "which-version?" headaches.
Electricity meter exports, gas invoices, on-site emissions, water intake, waste tickets: all the A3 (manufacturing) data the verifier calls "primary and measurable". Because these flows repeat across multiple product variants, entering them once here instantly updates every EPD that shares the plant.
Data on raw materials, their production, and transport (A1–A2). You can link each supplier’s dataset - like a cement EPD or recycled content figure - to every product that uses it. Update the file once, and all affected product records reflect the change instantly.
Bills of materials, packaging, installation ancillaries, use-phase maintenance, end-of-life scenarios. This is where A4 through D data live - tightly coupled to the declared unit (e.g., 1 m² of panel). Need to publish a variant? Duplicate the product, tweak the recipe, and the shared plant + supplier data stay intact.
Make your first EPD easier to start - with clear examples built for manufacturers.
Download the structured checklist to collect the right data from the right place, with practical examples for every input.
With the drawers labelled and ready, you can start dropping in the numbers from that checklist you just downloaded, confident that each one is going exactly where the standards expect it.
Ready to cut verification time? Experience Emidat in action - book a demo today!