EU Product Environmental Footprint (PEF)
European framework to measure the environmental impact of products and services
Measuring environmental sustainability of products is a big challenge. There exist many labels, which currently confuses consumers en producers. Therefore, the European Commission proposed to develop a standard method for measuring and communicating environmental performance throughout the life cycle.
In April 2013 the European Commission published a Communication to the European Parliament and the Council called ‘Building the Single Market for Green Products: Facilitating better information on the environmental performance of products and organisations’. It introduces a method for measuring and communicating environmental performance of products and services throughout the life cycle. This method is called Product Environmental Footprint (PEF).
Framework of standardized LCAs
The proposed PEF method is a framework of general requirements and principles to measure the environmental impact of products and services. Besides that, there exist more specific technical guidance for different product groups (‘category rules’). This means the main methodological choices in LCA studies can be standardized. It will then in principle does not make any difference who carries out these studies; if all the methodological rules are followed and all requirements met, the results will be virtually the same. This will result in transparency for producers and consumers.
The following things are standardized:
- Use of primary data and background data – missing data are drawn from the same background database.
- Harmonization of system boundaries, allocation rules and method for calculating environmental impacts.
Involvement of Mérieux NutriSciences | Blonk in the PEF developments
Since 2014 Blonk has been involved intensively in the European PEF developments. We serve on the Technical Advisory Board and the Agricultural Working Group of the European Commission, advising on methodologies and calculation rules. Our work also includes:
- 2018 - Beer: Full development of PEFCRs (Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules)
- 2018 - Feed: Full development of PEFCR (which was the first PEFCR to be officially approved by the European Commission)
- 2021 - Growing media: Full development of sectoral shadow PEFCR for Growing Media Europe (GME)
- 2023 - Fruit and vegetable shadow PEFCR: methodology and data creation
- 2024 - Flori-PEFCR: methodology and data creation for the floriculture sector
- 2024 - Partial update of the beer, feed, diary, and pet food PEFCRs
- EF 3.1 (2023) and 4.0 Databases (ongoing): developed data on food, feed and bio-based materials.
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Jasper Scholten
Get in touch with Jasper if you want to want to know more about standards development.