The International Organization for Standardization published the second edition of ISO 14025, the foundational standard governing Environmental Product Declarations, on June 24, 2026. It is the first substantive rewrite since the original 2006 version, and it lands at a moment when embodied carbon disclosure has become a routine part of specification, procurement, and Scope 3 reporting across the building products supply chain. For practitioners who treat EPDs as a settled reference document, the update is a reminder that the rules underneath those numbers just moved.
What ISO 14025:2026 actually changes
The revision retires the old Type I, II, and III environmental declaration taxonomy that has confused specifiers for two decades. Under the new standard, EPDs are defined simply as independently verified, life cycle assessment based environmental statements, with explicit language distinguishing them from self-declared claims under ISO 14021 and ecolabels under ISO 14024. That distinction matters practically: a manufacturer’s unverified sustainability claim can no longer be mistaken for, or marketed alongside, an EPD in a way that implies equivalent rigor.
The standard also formally incorporates ISO/TS 14027 and ISO/TS 14029, two technical specifications on product category rules and comparability that were previously advisory. EPD International, the Swedish nonprofit that operates the International EPD System and helped shape the revision, has said methodological consistency between two EPDs is not sufficient on its own to make them comparable. The new normative references push program operators toward tighter alignment on scope, system boundaries, and functional units, the details that determine whether a specifier can actually compare two structural products side by side.
Two other changes will show up in how EPDs get built rather than how they read. The revision recognizes prospective EPDs, allowing manufacturers to publish declarations based on data from comparable existing products or technologies before a full year of production data exists. That lets a new low carbon concrete or engineered wood product enter the market with a credible EPD sooner, provided assumptions and data limitations are independently verified and disclosed. The standard also introduces formal governance requirements for the software platforms that increasingly automate life cycle assessment and EPD generation, addressing a gap that had let some digital tools operate without the independence and conflict of interest safeguards required of human verifiers.
A parallel move: North American manufacturers get a shortcut
Separately, and in the same window, EPD International announced on June 10, 2026 that the International EPD System has adopted a UL Solutions product category rule, specifically the Builders Hardware, Part B category, to let North American manufacturers publish ISO 21930 compliant EPDs without reconciling their data against Europe’s EN 15804 framework from scratch. The arrangement grew out of a 2025 to 2026 pilot that generated more than 150 EPDs across construction related categories and will be reevaluated at the end of 2026.
Kate McFeaters, managing director of EPD North America, described the goal as meeting North American manufacturers within the PCR framework they already use while giving them the global reach of an internationally recognized program. For a domestic hardware or components manufacturer, that removes a real cost barrier: building one dataset that satisfies both a UL Solutions PCR and an internationally recognized program, rather than commissioning separate life cycle assessments for separate regional audiences. It also means specifiers evaluating products for projects with international supply chains or multinational ownership should expect to see more EPDs published under the International EPD System carrying North American PCR lineage, a hybrid that did not widely exist a year ago.
Why this matters beyond the EPD database
Embodied carbon comparisons only work if the underlying declarations mean the same thing. Whole building life cycle assessment tools, state and municipal buy clean procurement policies, and voluntary rating systems like LEED all lean on EPDs as their primary data source, and all of them assume a baseline consistency in how those documents are built and verified. The elimination of the Type I, II, III framework closes a loophole that let marketing claims sit next to verified declarations with an implied but false equivalence. The tightened comparability language addresses a complaint structural engineers and sustainability consultants have raised for years, that two EPDs for functionally identical products, say a glulam beam and a steel wide flange section sized for the same load, could report wildly different results depending on unstated assumptions in the underlying product category rule.
The practical catch is timing. ISO standards are not self-enforcing. They take effect for a given market only when program operators update their general programme instructions and product category rules to match, and when national standards bodies adopt or reference the revised text. EPD Australasia has already aligned its general programme instructions, version 5.0.1, with the new requirements. UL Solutions, NSF International, and ASTM International, the program operators most active in the United States, have not yet published a timeline for bringing their own instructions into conformance. Until they do, EPDs published under older program instructions remain valid, and specifiers will be working with a mixed population of pre and post revision declarations for some period.
What to do now
Specifiers and sustainability officers evaluating EPDs this fall should check the publication date and the program operator’s general programme instructions version on any declaration they cite, not just the product category rule, since the instructions determine whether a given EPD reflects the old or new verification requirements. Manufacturers with EPDs due for their five year update should ask their program operator directly whether the renewal will be issued under the current instructions or the revised ones, since the answer affects both cost and comparability with competitors’ declarations. Manufacturers considering a first EPD, particularly for a new or reformulated product, should ask about the prospective EPD pathway now available under the revised standard rather than assuming a full year of production data is a prerequisite. And anyone tracking Buy Clean procurement compliance should watch for guidance from state agencies on whether they will require ISO 14025:2026 aligned EPDs specifically, or continue accepting declarations issued under the prior instructions, since that determination will shape which products qualify for public procurement in the next code cycle.