Developing an environmental product declaration generator for the steel industry

Abstract

The steel industry is a significant source of environmental impacts in the European Union (EU), and a transition to more environmentally sustainable production methods is needed. However, the industry proposes also significant economic value, and with ever increasing in-ternational competition, environmental sustainability must be transformed into a business case. Industry-driven initiatives on product environmental footprint reporting have become popular in recent years, an example of such being the Environmental product declaration (EPD) which provides transparent, comprehensive and comparable product environmental in-formation. Despite their popularity, creating more EPDs is limited by the costs related to veri-fication and performing life cycle assessments (LCAs). One way for steel producers to streamline the creation of EPDs is to develop an EPD generator, but until now such a tool is yet to be developed in the industry. In the meanwhile, the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) is setting virtually the first mandatory product environmental footprint reporting requirements on steel products.

This thesis had three main objectives. The first objective was to identify and solve key is-sues in the development of an EPD generator for the steel industry. This was done by a case study on Ovako AB’s production site in Imatra, Finland. The second objective was to under-stand with a literature review the ESPR's impacts on steel producers utilising EPDs. The third objective was to combine the lessons learned from the former two, and to assess how the de-velopment of an EPD generator could support steel producers in compliance with the ESPR.

The key issues to developing a steel EPD generator included identification of user-adjustable parameters, allocating unparametrized data and determining the environmental sig-nificance of datapoints. The established methodology for solving these issues included study-ing the production process and applying EPD rules from the General Programme Instructions (GPI) and Product Category Rules (PCR), as well as by analysing environmental and produc-tion data with SimaPro. For the case production site, no additional data collection needs were identified.

The ESPR will likely cause an increased need to perform LCAs in the steel industry, as well as increase product-specific environmental reporting. Depending on the alignment of ESPR’s calculation methodology with that of the EPDs’, steel producers utilising EPDs may ei-ther risk a significant increase in reporting efforts or have an advantage over other producers due to a lower additional cost in compliance.

A steel EPD generator’s support in steel producers’ compliance with the ESPR highly de-pends on the adopted calculation methodology. However, as due to the ESPR more LCAs and product-specific environmental data is required, developing such a tool requires establishing LCA and data collection processes, which can be of support in future compliance with the ESPR. Using an EPD generator to directly produce DPPs for steel products is possible, but dependent on a highly aligned ESPR’s calculation methodology with that of the EPDs.