Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) of policy and market-relevant product groups

Expected Outcome:

In supporting the implementation of the European Green Deal, and in particular the circular economy action plan (CEAP) and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), successful proposals will contribute to the expected impacts of this Destination, notably addressing environmental impacts at a territorial level and involving civil society in fostering a circular economy.

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• improved knowledge for stakeholders on the value of a circular economy approach in addressing environmental pollution on air, soil and water and the pressures on biodiversity and ecosystems through the analysis of the environmental impacts of specific products;
• the development of sector-specific methods, data, tools and guidance documents for the assessment, communication and comparison of environmental impacts of targeted product groups, relying on Environmental Footprint (EF) methods;
• reduction of environmental impacts for a significant number of relevant products;
• engagement of stakeholders, including industry, public procurers, SMEs and NGOs, to enhance consistency, reliability and use of developed sustainability metrics and tools across sectors.

Scope:

The circular economy action plan (CEAP) aims to stimulate the development of sustainable products, in the EU and beyond, contributing to the EU’s 2050 climate neutrality target and to halt biodiversity loss. To achieve this, it establishes a sustainable product policy regulation that broadens the scope of the Ecodesign Directive both in terms of products (covering a very broad range of products, beyond energy-related products only) and new kinds of requirements. It will be key to achieve a sustainable, resilient and competitive circular economy.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a key source of information on environmental impacts of products, services or systems. The Commission proposed the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF)^[1] as a common way of measuring environmental performance. The PEF methodology, grounded on the LCA standard methodology, allows manufacturers and consumers to obtain reliable and comparable information about the performance of products with respect to various environmental impact categories. A calculation based on the general PEF methods gives quantitative information on the impacts of products, taking into consideration the entire value chain.

R&I activities in the proposal should:

• review existing knowledge on LCA/PEF, identify and fill knowledge gaps and then develop and test PEF category rules for selected product groups of policy and market relevance;
• assess the added value and cost-benefit of these rules compared to other methods or criteria;
• perform in-depth full life cycle assessment studies (also addressing end-of-life aspects) based on PEF for those products groups to identify, quantify, interpret and communicate environmental impacts;
• develop appropriate datasets tailored to the assessed product groups identifying and filling data gaps, as much as possible based on industry and other representative data, and create tools which will be made publicly available to enable and ease PEF-compliant assessments and communications among stakeholders, as well as their verification;
• develop and apply approaches and methods to derive and support potential ecodesign requirements^[2] from PEF-compliant assessments, i.e. how decisions for design with a lower environmental footprint can be motivated, and further assess their socio-economic impacts;
• develop and apply approaches and methods: a) to identify and check sustainability requirements used or proposed in legislation, labels and standards relevant for the products in study; b) to analyse how to enhance consistency, synergies and harmonisation between such requirements and ecodesign requirements;
• develop guidance, training and dissemination strategies and material to support the wider use of PEF in the selected sector(s).

Proposals should focus on at least one of the following product groups: home/interior textiles; final products made of metals, or plastics; detergents; lubricants, paints and varnishes; polymers; selected groups of other chemicals; ICT products.

For the analysed product groups, proposals should target a sufficiently broad and granular scope, targeting comprehensive representative sub-categories and products on the market. In doing that, proposals should refer to relevant European, international, and national classification systems and standards where possible. Projects should adhere to the most recent EU rules and data^[2] established for the PEF methods and bring together all relevant expert groups and different stakeholders active along the value chains of the selected product groups (industry members, researchers, SMEs and NGOs).

Proposals should develop appropriate and comparable datasets for assessing the analysed products as well as tools and digital solutions to facilitate the sharing and processing of information along the value chain as well as the assessment, communication and verification of environmental characteristics of products based on the PEF method.

As part of the project, proposals should also address the knowledge gap in capacity and skills, especially for SMEs, potentially limiting the understanding, conducting and implementing of PEF-based assessments. Learning and training materials should be developed for dissemination and training purposes within and across companies and value chains.

The data produced in this topic should be open access in line with FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable). Furthermore, different tasks, outputs, interactions with stakeholders, and communication, dissemination and exploitation activities should be conceived in a logical sequence along the lifetime of the project.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32021H2279; https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:L_202401781. The current recommendation for PEF is the recommendation 2021/2279 which is now being revised with the target of having a new recommendation for 2025.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.