Bamboo LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) and EPD (Environmental Product Declaration)
World leading in Environmental reporting - MOSO® is the first bamboo company worldwide to have published the environmental impact of its bamboo products through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD).
You may ask yourself: “Just exactly how green is bamboo?”. Fortunately there are various independent scientific methodologies available to determine the exact environmental impact of a material from production to end-of-life. These methodologies such as the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) following ISO 14040/44 and Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) following EN 15804 include crucial environmental impact factors such as toxicity, depletion and greenhouse gas emissions (carbon footprint).
Bambus Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
In cooperation with INBAR and Delft University of Technology, MOSO® presented a full LCA study on industrial bamboo products during the successful climate conference COP 21 in Paris, December 2015. The report concludes that manufacturing the MOSO® bamboo products in China, shipping to Europe and end-of-life disposal of the material by incineration for electricity generation in the Netherlands, has a net negative carbon footprint. This is due to the significant reforestation and afforestation bamboo projects in China, increasing the carbon stock in forest, as well as the substitution of fossil fuels in End of Life, based on relevant waste scenarios in the Netherlands.
Bamboo Environmental Product Declaration (EPD)
Besides the LCA report, in 2016 MOSO® released various independently verified EPD’s (EN 15804) for its product range. This kind of so-called Type III EPD merits credits for transparency in environmental reporting for leading green building schemes such as LEED, BREEAM but also national schemes such as DGNB (Germany), HQE (France) and Green Star (Australia). In contrast to the LCA study the EPD does not include the carbon sequestration benefit of MOSO® bamboo in the products nor in the expanding forest.