Product Environmental Footprints (PEF) are the method of environmental life cycle analysis that the European Commission has developed for products and services being placed onto the European market. The PEF method measures and communicates the environmental performance of goods, services and organisations across their whole lifecycle. They cover 16 environmental impacts, including climate change, and impacts related to water, air, resources, land use and toxicity, and give a comparison of environmental performances between similar products and companies active in similar sectors.
ESTC is currently working with the European Commission to establishing the Category Rules that will describe how PEFs for synthetic turf surfaces should be calculated, a project which is funded under the LIFE programme of the EU.
Last week, the Commission adopted a revised Recommendation on the use of PEFs. Announcing the new Recommendation the Commission stated that using PEFs will help companies to calculate their environmental performance based on reliable, verifiable, and comparable information, and for other actors, such as public administrations, NGOs and businesses to have access to such information. It will incentivise industry to manufacture products that have a better environmental performance, helping the EU’s European Green Deal and circular economy ambitions.
Commissioner for Environment, Fisheries and Oceans, Virginijus Sinkevičius said: “The EU Environmental Footprint (PEF) methods are the most reliable, comparable and verifiable way to know the real environmental footprint of a product or organisation to date. Europeans are increasingly aware of their own environmental footprint, and many want to make environmentally friendly choices in their daily lives. These methods will help to improve environmental performance and help achieve a truly clean and circular economy”.
Full details about the new EC recommendation can be found on : https://ec.europa.eu/environment/news/environmental-footprint-methods-2021-12-16_en