Environmental Product Declaration

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is a voluntary tool for transparent presentation of environmental impacts of offered products or services to customers and the wider public, which is verified by third party.

Environmental impacts are assessed using the LCA method (Life Cycle Assessment) in accordance with ISO 14 040:2006 and ISO 14 044:2006 standards, as well as the ISO 14 025:2006 standard for developing environmental declarations, and more detailed EPD methodologies applied for specific products or product groups – in case of energy by-products the EN 15 804:2012 + A2:2019/AC:2021 standard was used.

The LCA method considers the environmental impacts of all important inputs, outputs and processes in the upstream part of products value chain (so-called cradle to gate principle), or throughout the entire life cycle (so-called cradle to grave). In the first case, the assessment includes the following phases: obtaining primary materials (mainly through mining), their processing, product manufacturing, (service provision), production waste management, related transport and so on. When assessing the full life cycle, subsequent phases are included: product use by users and end-of-life represented mostly by waste management. The resulting environmental impacts are presented in various impact categories – climate change, acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, fossil resources depletion, ecotoxicity etc.

The company ČEZ, a. s., has obtained 7 EPD certificates – 4 for power plant fly ash and 3 for flue gas desulphurisation gypsum:

Fly ash Trmice

Fly ash Ledvice

Fly ash Mělník

Fly ash Tušimice and Prunéřov

FGD gypsum Ledvice

FGD gypsum Mělník

FGD gypsum Tušimice and Prunéřov

Fly ash and flue gas desulphurisation gypsum are by-products from coal combustion in heating and power plants. Fly ash is generated during flue gas cleaning – specifically in the phase of removing particulate matter using fabric filters or electrostatic precipitators. Flue gas desulphurisation gypsum is produced during flue gas purification through a chemical reaction between sulphur oxides and limestone in a wet limestone scrubber. Both products are fine inorganic powders, which are under quality control and are certified as construction materials. Business partners usually use them in the production of cement, concrete or plasterboard etc. Thanks to EPD, users are able, for example, to calculate the carbon footprint of construction material containing these energy by-products, or even the footprint of an entire building that incoroporates such construction material.

All the EPDs can be found in the international EPD library at environdec.com/library or in our ESG documents library.