LCA and EPD: Understanding the Difference in Sustainable HVAC Design

What Is an LCA?

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a type of analysis that follows a specific scientific methodology used to calculate the environmental impact of a product across its entire life cycle. To do so, the practitioners performing the analysis research the product’s impact by looking at each phase of its life: from raw material extraction through manufacturing, transport, use, and end-of-life or disposal.

When checking an LCA, it is important to understand what part or parts of the lifecycle analysis are included in the analysis. The scope of each LCA is defined every time.

An LCA is built around a defined quantity of product (for example, 1 m² of duct fabric) that allows results to be calculated and, under the right conditions, compared. The assessment also follows Product Category Rules (PCRs), which set out exactly what must be measured and how, so that results within the same product category are calculated consistently.

To assess each phase, LCAs often follow the guide of international standards, such as ISO 14040 and 14044. Thus, an LCA typically quantifies environmental impact across:

• Global Warming Potential (GWP), which quantifies a product’s contribution to climate change in kg of CO₂ e and looks into emissions from burning fossil fuels, biogenic sources and land-use change from raw material production. This measure is often also named GHG emissions (Green House Gases).
• Ozone depletion, acidification, and eutrophication, which measure a product’s contribution to the breakdown of the atmospheric ozone layer, the acidification of soil and water from airborne pollutants, and the excess nutrient loading of freshwater, marine, and terrestrial ecosystems.
• Resource use, which tracks how much renewable and non-renewable primary energy a product consumes over its life cycle, how much it contributes to water scarcity and how much of its material input comes from secondary (recycled or reused) sources rather than virgin extraction.
• Waste output, which accounts for the hazardous and non-hazardous waste a product generates and disposes of, as well as how much of its end-of-life material is diverted into recycling or energy recovery rather than sent to landfill.

Besides these parameters, LCAs may also include other environmental data and, in the future, even social impacts may be included in the LCA calculations. As a result, LCAs are thorough, highly technical, long and detailed. Sometimes they can become too detailed for someone outside the company or the institution that carried out the analysis to follow. And so, even though an LCA is perfectly fine to use, many contractors or consultants often prefer to check the EPDs.

What Is an EPD?

In simple terms, an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) can be defined as the document that officially certifies the result of the LCA, and so the first and main difference between an LCA and an EPD is that an EPD goes through third-party verification. An independent verifier, separate from the company and the author of the LCA, checks the calculations against the standards before the EPD is published.

Besides third-party verification, a few other things distinguish an EPD from the underlying LCA they report on:

• EPDs follow specific ISO standards depending on the product category, just as LCAs follow category-specific PCRs. The most common EPD standards are ISO 14025 and, for construction products, EN 15804.
• EPDs are prepared to function as documentation that contractors, architects, or other clients can add to their own Green Building certification requests. Even though an LCA would also technically work, EPDs are easier to work with for people outside the company and they are standardized.
• EPDs are kept up to date, forcing consistency. Although this is more a market demand than a regulated requirement, EPDs are renewed periodically, typically after five years, and the data must be updated. Since EPDs are certified and standardized, they also need to keep pace with EU requirements, which are evolving under the new ecodesign criteria the EU is introducing.

One important detail is that two EPDs are only meaningfully comparable if they follow the same product category rules and are built on comparable background databases and the quantity and units are comparable.

FabricAir’s LCA and EPD

FabricAir holds a third-party verified EPD (registration MD-24129-EN), issued through EPD Danmark and valid through December 2029 for our woven, dyed polyester duct fabric and suspension systems. FabricAir’s own underlying LCA is prepared by Kaunas Technical University (KTU), independent experts in LCA methods and lifecycle impact assessment.

FabricAir’s EPD covers the complete lifecycle of the system, from raw materials and manufacturing, through transport and installation, all the way to end-of-life disposal and recycling. Many EPDs on the market only cover the factory gate, leaving out installation, maintenance, and disposal. FabricAir’s EPD and LCA cover 99.95% of the product’s weight across every stage. This means the number a specifier sees reflects the duct’s entire life in a building, not just its production.

Our EPD also covers multiple suspension variants used across our duct systems. The declared unit (1 m²) includes both the fabric and the suspension system needed to install it, calculated separately for each suspension configuration. This matters because the metal hardware (brackets, rails, suspension components) typically makes up 23%–64% of a duct’s total weight, depending on the configuration. A number based on fabric alone would miss most of the product’s real footprint. GWP figures can vary meaningfully between suspension configurations, and the difference comes from the hardware, not the textile.

What this means for your building

FabricAir’s duct systems are manufactured using renewable electricity (wind and solar, backed by Guarantees of Origin). They are designed to last 30 years and need washing only about once per decade. At end-of-life, the EPD accounts for realistic outcomes for European textile waste today, rather than assuming an idealized recycling scenario that may not reflect current infrastructure.

For architects, consulting engineers, and sustainability teams working on a building’s environmental documentation, our LCA and EPD data supports two distinct but related needs:

• Design decisions. The per-m² GWP and resource-use figures can be plugged directly into a building-level LCA or embodied carbon model, using the suspension type that matches the actual project specification rather than a generic industry average. Because the data is broken out by life cycle module, a design team can also see where impact concentrates which is useful when comparing design or material options. FabricAir calculates this carbon footprint for every product on every project, so specifiers always work with a figure matched to the exact system quoted, not a generic industry number.
• Compliance and certification. The EPD’s third-party verification and EN 15804 alignment make it directly usable for LEED, BREEAM, and DGNB material disclosure and embodied carbon credits, and for the kind of building-level LCA documentation increasingly required under evolving EU construction regulations. Because FabricAir’s EPD is registered with EPD Danmark and follows the same PCR framework used across the industry the data is structured to be checked and cross-referenced by auditors and certifying bodies.

FabricAir calculates the carbon footprint for every product on every project. This data comes to standard with every quote.

The Takeaway

An LCA is the documented, thorough analysis that a company commissions to an institution in order to assess the environmental impact of their products. It exists as real documentation on its own and it serves as the foundation for the third party verified EDP.

In practice, having an EPD means two things:

• A company’s sustainability claims are backed by an independent third party, different from the company and the author of the LCA.
• Clients get a ready-made document that they can easily use to get their own buildings certified.

FabricAir’s EPD reflects a Life Cycle Assessment that can help your building get certified.