Get the Complete Picture

Interface was the first North American flooring manufacturer to publish a third party verified Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) in 2009 and the first flooring manufacturer to publish EPDs for all standard products globally in 2012. Now, 99% of Interface products globally, including all standard carpet and resilient flooring styles, have a product-specific EPD.

See our EPDs

Why are EPDs so important?

An EPD provides transparent, credible information on the material flows and environmental impacts that happen during the entire life of a product. It’s similar to the ingredient and nutrition labels on food. Instead of calories and recommended daily allowances, an EPD shows things like raw material extraction, energy use, emissions to air, soil and water, and water use and waste generation.  

But of all the data published in an EPD, the one that is most urgent to understand is Global Warming Potential (GWP), also known as a product’s carbon footprint. This number is how you know whether a product is better or worse for global warming. For most building products, the vast majority of emissions occur before the product even ships to the jobsite. These upstream emissions are known in the building industry as the Embodied Carbon of a material.

It is possible for building products to achieve dramatic reductions in their Embodied Carbon emissions by using EPD data and tools that include EPD data like the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) Tool to select better products.

EPDs and LEED

For customers seeking LEED certification for their buildings, using EPDs to disclose and reduce our impacts allows our products to contribute to several LEED credits, including the Building Product Disclosure and Optimization points for Environmental Product Declaration (Option 1) and LCA/Embodied Carbon Optimization (Option 2).

How are EPDs created?

Companies must commit to fully disclose what is usually confidential information about how products are made. In addition, companies must perform a comprehensive life cycle assessment according to ISO 14040 and 14044 standards. From this information, an Environmental Product Declaration is developed based on ISO 14025 standards. Both the EPD and the LCA are third party verified.

Carpet Tile:

Carpet Tile on Graphlex™ or Graphlar™ Backing:

EPDs for Resilient Flooring:

LEED v4 MR Building Product Disclosure and Optimization Option 2 Documentation: