Implications of the future EUROPEAN ORGANISATION ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT

At the time of writing, many of the Basque Ecodesign Center companies already have embarked on using Environmental Product Declations (EPDs) as instruments for transparency and environmental comparison of their products.  The evolution of those systems across Europe will be consolidated when the European product environmental footprint, currently in the pipeline, is approved once and for all. However, this European instrument covers two aspects, product and organisation. The ?rst of the Basque Ecodesign Center roundtables held in 2014 took place at the start of the year in order to be able to analyse in detail the implications of the future European Organisation Environmental Footprint.

The environmental footprint of an organisation is de?ned as a multi-criterion measurement of the environmental performance of an organisation that provides goods or services, from a life cycle perspective. The internal applications can include help on environmental management, pinpointing the critical points from the environmental perspective, improving and monitoring environmental performance, and can implicitly mean savings opportunities.

In turn, the external applications (for example, communicating with the interested parties or from Business-to -Business (B2B), relations with public authorities or investors) o?er a wide range of possibilities, including responding to requests for information from investors, marketing, comparative assessment and response to the requirements raised in the environmental policies Europe-wide or in the di?erent Member States.

After the round table, and given the importance of the instrument, it was deemed appropriate to run an initial pilot scheme applied to the situation of one of the partner companies.