Hi,
I was wondering how the performance ranking of EPD’s works. I found some paints with negative or zero carbon intensity, but positive A1-A3 carbon, and even another number of carbon in the EPD which is also positive. How does this work? Something should be negative or zero in the EPD, no? I took screenshot below.
Thanks
Hi Robin,
Thank you for your question. You are correct that products with negative emissions require special handling in our benchmarks.
In cases where a product’s total A1-A3 value is negative (as can happen under EN 15804+A2), the system should use the GWP-Fossil value for comparison. This approach provides a more consistent benchmark against GWP values from CML and TRACI methodologies. I have asked our data specialists to review the resources you mentioned.
Regarding the values that appear as 0.0, this is typically a rounding issue. The emissions per functional unit are so low that they are displayed as zero. For example, the ‘Resinous floor coatings’ resource has an actual emission value of 0.0000267 kg CO2e/m2.
We are currently developing a completely redesigned comparison and benchmark feature that will handle these smaller values with greater precision. We expect to share more details on this later in the year.
Thanks for you reply Steven. I understand the issue with the rounding to zero.
But with the negative values, the strange thing is that there are no negative values in de EPD. The values in the EPD are rather average… But they are top ranking, because they turnout negative in the benchmark al of a sudden!
I can imagine the confusion indeed, I too would question this! If the emissions are average in the EPD (which they are, I looked over it a bit too quick) then I am thinking what happened here is that the system reads the value for GWP A1-A3 from the wrong place in our database, our data specialists will have to investigate what went wrong and will correct it hopefully soon 
.
Steven, I just found another one … It’s a ready mix concrete with just to different numbers! I’m encountering more and more as I go. Maybe the data-team should do a deep check
Hi Robin,
Thank you for flagging this one as well. I’ve passed it to our data team.
We are planning a thorough review of the recently added EPDs to ensure data integrity.
Hi Robin,
Just a quick follow-up to your message.
Our team has completed a thorough review and found a number of resources that had their emissions “mixed up,” as we had used an incorrect column to populate the A1-A3 value. The affected resources have been disabled, and new ones with the correct emissions have been created. Users of the disabled resources will automatically receive a message that a new version is available under the same EPD number or resource name.
We also found several resources with negative emissions in other columns. In these cases, the issue lies with the manufacturer (e.g., ODP cannot be negative but it happens in EPDs), such EPDs sometimes pass third-party verification. These resources normally receive an automatic warning stating that some impacts are unusual, but they can still be used with caution. The ones that missed this warning, now have been assigned one.
We will be implementing updated quality checks for these specific use cases; however, I am sure others will arise over time. Digital data in our industry is far from being standard, and until then, we will need to work hard to maintain the level of quality our users are accustomed to.
Thanks again for raising this!
