Mass production of environmental product declarations

A computer-implemented method of generating an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) for a product, comprising:

• i) generating the base data required for the EPD by:
• a) defining a Homogeneous Product Family (HPF) comprising a plurality of products having similar functions, product standards, materials and manufacturing processes;
• b) querying a product database to obtain product structure parameters and product function parameters for each member of the HPF;
• c) selecting at least three representative members of the HPF;
• d) conducting a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) according to ISO 14040 for the identified representative members of the HPF over a plurality of environmental impact categories;
• e) determining a scaling function using multiparameter linear regression for each environmental impact category based upon at least one parameter pair comprising a product structure factor and a product function parameter obtained from the product database;
• f) determining a quality indicator indicating a quality of the scaling function;
• g) in response to the quality indicator being greater than or equal to a pre-determined threshold, storing the respective scaling functions with the product data for the corresponding product in the HPF in the product database;
• and
• h) determining and associating a reference product to provide base data required for the EPD with each product in the HPF;
• and,
• ii) generating the EPD by
• i) selecting a product in the product database for which the base data required for the EPD is available;
• j) accessing the respective scaling functions within the product's HPF for each environmental impact category from the product database, the product data of the associated reference product;
• and
• k) on a basis of the scaling functions, the base data and the product data of the associated reference product, generating the EPD for the selected product.