Tarkett: Perfecting Product Transparency

For this flooring surfaces innovator, transparency is the name of the EPD game.

Ask sustainable flooring manufacturer Tarkett about the importance of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), and it offers a very straightforward answer: Everyone should be able to clearly see and understand exactly what goes into the products they choose and the impact such materials have. 

The company uses EPDs to accumulate data about the environmental impacts of its products. It then shares that data freely via all customer-facing media: its website, product brochures, and third-party specification sites such as Ecomedes, the Materials portal, and Material Bank. 

Tarkett also promotes the existence of EPDs within its Floorprint documents. “Tarkett developed Floorprint to provide a holistic view of each of our products,” notes Keesha Nickison, content manager at Tarkett. “It shows how each flooring selection contributes to the health and well-being of people and the environment, while taking action to combat climate change.”

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) tracks a product’s life cycle, from materials extraction to waste disposal and, hopefully, reuse or recycling. SOURCE: Tarkett

Floorprint also lists each certification of a product and all transparency documents available—including EPDs. It also dedicates a page to illustrating the complete life cycle impacts of the product. “EPDs are dense, technical documents,” Nickison notes. “Clearly illustrating the lifecycle and carbon impacts at each stage of the product life makes it easy for our customers to find and comprehend the information.” 

It can also help clear up misperceptions that suppliers, manufacturers and customers have about EPDs. For manufacturers like Tarkett, who are investing in a holistic approach to reducing the carbon impacts of their products, an EPD can serve to spotlight areas within a particular product that could be contributing significantly to its carbon footprint. But EPDs were not intended to be a tool for comparison; they were meant to assist manufacturers in their efforts to isolate areas within the manufacturing process for optimization, according to Nickison.

There is also confusion over a product’s end-of-life calculation. “The EPD metric is intended to give a view of the full life cycle of a product, but the end-of-life is assumed to be landfill or incineration,” Nickison notes. “We hope adoption of an industry change to the EPD standard would make the declaration of a product’s recyclability an option, so that one day we can capture and measure the positive carbon impacts that result when we keep materials in use.”

The industry is currently using EPDs primarily to identify the global warming potential (GWP) or embodied carbon of a product. “However, there’s so much more information to be mined from these documents,” she notes. “GWP is only scratching the surface.”

From a manufacturer’s perspective, “EPDs are a great starting point for determining which levers we can pull to reduce the impacts of our product,” Nickison adds. “We can see what factors are having the most influence on the metrics, and prioritize our projects around those to reduce the impact of the particular product.”

Tarkett uses EPDs to gather important information on the environmental impact of its products, especially their embodied carbon potential. CREDIT: iStock/HJBC