EPD of Extra-Virgin Olive Oil: an Italian Experience

The Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is the type III environmental label based on ISO 14025:2006 international standard. It is designed to improve environmental communication between producers (business to business) and between distributors and consumers (business to consumer). The EPD provides information about environmental characteristics of products, by using some standardized parameters for each commodity or service. In order to guarantee the objectivity and credibility of the data considered for the EPD, the life cycle assessment (LCA) is the methodology used for the identification and quantification of environmental impacts. The EPD is applicable to all products or services, regardless of their use or placement in the production chain. Nowadays many EPDs were been released by the International EPD System®, in particular for the agro-food sector, due to the increased interest of compa-nies and customers towards this environmental communication tool. Recently, also for the production of extra virgin olive oil the EPD was been achieved (PCR 2010:07, version 1.0 dated 27/04/2010). This paper presents the application of PCR for olive oil to get the EPD using a LCA applied to the production of pitted extra virgin olive. The procedure for the EPD has given the opportunity to suggest some modifications to the PCR, which could be submitted after the date of their expiry (31st December 2013).