Cepi, together with its member companies, has developed a life-cycle analysis (LCA) tool for paper products that is fully based on the EU’s sustainability guidelines.
The tool reportedly enables any Cepi member company to calculate product LCAs and validate their green claims within the Green Deal context.
In December 2019, the European Commission presented its Green Deal roadmap, a strategy aimed at putting Europe on the right track for climate neutrality by 2050, while encouraging sustainable economic growth.
In line with this strategy, the Commission decided to leverage the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) LCA method, to help distinguish between valid sustainability claims and “greenwashing”.
The European paper industry’s version of this method, the PEFCR, allows in-depth primary production data to be used for the results, while enabling the understanding of potential areas of improvement. Cepi’s new LCA tool is fully based on these rules and is available to its members free of charge.
It has been designed for both LCA experts as well as users less familiar with the LCA methodologies, and Cepi hopes that having access to an LCA tool will help small and medium-size enterprises to compute complex product environmental footprints for their products.
