Looking for FDES help to create your environmental and health declarations? Discover the 5 key steps to a compliant FDES, from data collection to publication on INIES.
An Environmental and Health Declaration Sheet—the well-known EPD—is the environmental ID card for a construction product. It is a standardized document (EN 15804 standard + French national supplement) that compiles 36 environmental indicators and a health section, and it must be verified by an independent third party before it can be published.
In practical terms, an EPD is used to measure the actual carbon footprint of your products from cradle to grave: raw materials, manufacturing, transport, installation, product life, and end-of-life. Without your own EPD, default data—which is much more penalizing—will be used for your products in RE2020 calculations for new buildings.
Many manufacturers and building industry professionals contact us with the same question: how do we actually do this? This guide outlines, step by step, the method we use at Altopi to support our clients in creating their EPDs.
Before collecting any data, you need to make a strategic choice: which product to declare, and in what format? A company with a large catalog cannot create all its EPDs at once. You must therefore identify the most useful product to cover first: the best-seller, or the one that appears most frequently in public procurement and tenders.
You also need to decide between an individual EPD (a single product, a single reference) or a range-based individual EPD (several similar references covered by a single sheet). Three pitfalls consistently arise at this stage:
This step also defines the functional unit (usually square meters, sometimes kilos or units—you don't choose this; it depends on the product category) and the service life of the product, which must be justifiable based on real-world conditions.
This is by far the trickiest part of an EPD project. You need to gather a massive amount of manufacturing data: raw materials, energy consumption, production waste, packaging (your own, as well as your suppliers'), and transport at every stage. On top of this, there are upstream data—data from your suppliers themselves, who may already have their own EPDs for a component you integrate.
This collection process requires input from several internal departments: production, purchasing, quality, and management. This is often where EPD projects fall behind due to a lack of structured collection tracking. One point that should never be overlooked: traceability. Every piece of data must be justifiable—where it comes from and who provided it—so that the verifier can process your file without any roadblocks.
The calculation is based on a full Life Cycle Assessment, structured into standardized stages (A1 to A5 for production and installation, B for product life, C for end-of-life, D for benefits and loads beyond the system). Each stage is quantified using emission factors (at Altopi, we rely primarily on the Ecoinvent database) and sometimes requires methodological choices: allocations between several products manufactured at the same site, proxies when exact data is unavailable, and the application of official end-of-life scenarios.
The final deliverable is not limited to the sheet itself: it also includes a project report (the document the verifier will actually examine) and detailed calculation tables. A specific point of vigilance for range-based EPDs: the validity framework, which requires that the impact variance between different options in the range does not exceed 35%.
Verification is not the most complex step, but it is often the longest: there are only about fifty accredited verifiers in France, and their availability can be limited. The verifier examines your quantities, emission factors, the consistency of your databases and references, and engages in discussions with you until an agreement is reached. It is not a penalty, but an iterative process: it is best to plan for it well in advance.
Once verified, your EPD is submitted and published on INIES, the official French database that lists all EPD sheets. It is then valid for 5 years. But publishing an EPD is only half the work: you then need to actively promote it, share it with your sales teams, systematically include it in your tender responses, and communicate it to your partner design offices. An EPD that is published but never highlighted remains a mere compliance exercise, whereas it should be a powerful sales argument.
Comptez en moyenne 7 mois pour aboutir à une FDES publiée, principalement à cause des délais de vérification. Côté budget, le coût total se situe généralement entre 6 000 et 15 000 €, incluant la vérification (3 000 à 4 000 €), le dépôt sur INIES (200 €) et l'outil logiciel, dont la licence peut atteindre plusieurs milliers d'euros par an si vous choisissez de l'acquérir en propre plutôt que via un prestataire.
Good FDES software makes data entry easier, manages product ranges, and automatically generates reports and exports. However, no tool, no matter how powerful, can decide your scope, functional unit, or allocation choices for you, nor can it manage data collection from your teams or handle the relationship with the verifier. There is no "one-click" FDES software—human expertise is essential at every step.
That is why most manufacturers creating their first FDES choose full FDES support rather than just a tool: an expert firm handles the scoping, coordinates data collection from your teams and suppliers, performs the LCA, writes the declaration and report, and manages the verification process through to publication on INIES.
At Altopi, we support our clients from A to Z with their environmental and health declarations: scoping, data collection, LCA calculation, drafting, verification, and publication. Over 400 companies have already trusted us to obtain their FDES.
👉 Discover our turnkey FDES support or speak directly with an Altopi expert.
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