Milestone Environmental Product Declaration

British Precast and Precast Flooring Federation (PFF) publish hollowcore flooring EPD

BRITISH Precast, in conjunction with the Precast Flooring Federation (PFF), have announced the publication of a third party verified, BS EN15804-compliant generic hollowcore flooring Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), which was launched at Ecobuild 2017. 

The EPD, which covers a generic one square metre of 150mm deep precast hollowcore flooring and incorporates data from members of the PFF, was verified and published on 8 March 2017 and is valid for five years. It is available for download on the Institut Bauen und Umwelt (IBU) and British Precast websites.

British Precast’s EPD project commissioned the sustainability consultancy ‘thinkstep’ to deliver a bespoke EPD calculator tool, which was used to deliver the hollowcore flooring EPD. 

Publication of the EPD is said to signify an important milestone in the wider British Precast EPD project, because the calculator tool is now verified by IBU to produce generic and company-specific EPDs for the concrete sector. 

Andrew Minson, executive director of MPA-British Precast, commented: ‘We are delighted with the recent publication of the hollowcore flooring EPD, as it not only gives members of the PFF a verified EN15804 EPD to use in BREEAM/CEEQUAL and BIM-enabled projects, but it also gives us proof of the EPD calculator tool’s compliance and capabilities.

‘We will now deliver generic EPDs for all our product groups, and other cement-based products in the MPA family, and can deliver proprietary EPDs for British Precast and MPA members.’

The generic EPDs fulfil a number of purposes as part of the sector’s strategic work on sustainability. First, at the earliest design stages for a built asset the supplier is unknown, so an industry-wide EPD will be helpful to designers. Secondly, it is anticipated that the generic EPDs when published will act as a bridge for producer members, allowing them to represent the environmental credentials of their products to customers before companies move to publish their own EPDs.

The hollowcore flooring EPD is the first to be produced by the project. Forthcoming EPDs to be published are:

• 1 square metre of concrete blocks (aggregate blocks)
• 1 cubic metre of aircrete blocks
• 1 tonne of concrete paving products
• 1 cubic metre of precast concrete ground beam
• 1 square metre of single-leaf architectural cladding
• 1 metre length of DN600 concrete pipe with Class B bedding
• 1 tonne of average box culvert
• 1 tonne of ready-mixed concrete, in collaboration with BRMCA
• 1 tonne of mortar, in collaboration with MIA

The British Precast EPD project is part of the Mineral Products Association’s wider commitment to provide strong leadership on sustainability within the mineral products sector.

MPA Cement published a ‘cradle-to-gate’ EPD for a ‘UK average Portland cement’ in spring 2014. This EPD was also developed in collaboration with ‘thinkstep’ and published through the same third party verification scheme. Both EPDs can be found by searching the database on the IBU website.