NorDan, a leading European manufacturer of windows and doors, has established itself as a pioneer in Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) production. By effectively utilizing LCA.no’s EPD Generator, they have achieved an unprecedented scale of EPD production, giving them a significant competitive advantage in an increasingly environmentally conscious market.
A Family Business with €500 Million Turnover
NorDan is a Norwegian, family-owned group established in Moi, Rogaland, in 1926. Now with the third and fourth generations of the Rasmussen family active in daily operations. Headquartered in Moi, they currently operate 12 factories and employ 2,300 people, producing around 700,000 products annually with a turnover of almost €500 million. Their main markets are Norway, the UK, Sweden, and Denmark, but they also sell to Ireland, Iceland, Poland, and the Baltic countries.
NorDan’s Sustainability Strategy: A Holistic Approach
The company has a comprehensive sustainability strategy that extends beyond EPD production. The strategy focuses on four key areas: local values, human focus, resource efficiency, and partnerships. Fredrik Jonsson, Team Leader CC Environmental Certification, environment and digital product information at NorDan, emphasizes the importance of holistic thinking:
– It’s crucial that these key areas are viewed in context. This means not only producing energy-efficient products but also actively influencing the market to choose more sustainable solutions and continuously reducing resource consumption. NorDan dares to set environmental requirements for its subcontractors and prioritizes close, long-term relationships with companies that share their values – an approach we call “Best friends.” This includes demanding environmental documentation, such as EPDs, and documentation on the handling of hazardous goods.
Order-Specific EPDs: A Complex Production
NorDan’s production is largely based on customized products. This means that each order can have unique combinations of products and specifications. Jonsson explains the particular challenge:
– What’s special about our windows and doors is that we almost exclusively work with project-specified products. Even if the products look alike, there can be significant differences in components – glass with different standards regarding sound, environment, fire, etc. This places many demands on our products, not just windows. We published our first EPD in 2014, and I recently reviewed it, and it struck me how far we’ve come. The 2014 EPD shows a snapshot of that specific window. A small change in the glass, and the EPD for this seemingly identical window is no longer valid. That’s how we realized we needed order-specific EPDs.
When NorDan receives an order or inquiry, this product goes to the EPD Generator for calculation. This creates a verified project-specific EPD. It’s not published, but the values are retrieved back to NorDan. An order can contain as many as 200 different products. The company now have over 400,000 project-spesifics but unpublished EPDs in the EPD Generator through LCA.no. A hugely impressive number, even in a global context. In comparison, there are a total of 5,500 published EPDs at EPD Norge.
LCA.no’s EPD Generator – The Key to Efficiency
NorDan, like many other companies, had an early experience of how costly producing an EPD can be. In 2019, they had produced 10 EPDs and needed a further 20 to meet internal requirements.
– We work closely with Treteknisk, and they told us about their collaboration with LCA.no to create an EPD Generator that could be relevant for us. We set up a specification of what we wanted the generator to do for us. We quickly saw that it met our requirements and wishes, of course with some adjustments for NorDan along the way.
– We wanted, among other things, to avoid manual data entry – and LCA.no’s API solution solved most of the job. It also has an analysis function, which allows us to simulate how different choices affect the environmental footprint. We use this extensively.
– The information is, of course, never better than what you feed the generator, and the market should improve on this. Less focus on producing the cheapest product at that moment, but ensuring that all factors have been included.
The EPD Generator makes it possible to quickly and efficiently test different materials and components and immediately see the effect on the total EPD. The information entered into the EPD Generator must, of course, be accurate to provide a correct result for this specific product.
Results and Competitive Advantage: A Transformation in Scale
This massive production of order-specific EPDs gives NorDan a significant competitive advantage. Customers appreciate access to detailed environmental information for each product. NorDan has also achieved a significant reduction in time and costs associated with EPD production. Jonsson summarizes the efficiency gains:
– It’s like night and day. Before, producing an EPD could take a year, including the time it takes to collect data and so on. Now it can take one to two days from start to verification because we have now systematized all our information in one place, down to the detail level. And eventually, even more down to the customer level. And the more we do, the better it gets.
Future Plans: Continuous Improvement and Innovation
NorDan aims to continuously improve its EPDs and fully utilize the LCA.no platform. The next step includes integrating more specific transport information, down to the delivery address level. Jonsson stresses the importance of getting started with EPD production and not underestimating the challenges:
– LCA.no was the right choice for us. If you’re looking for a solution, first see if you have partners to learn from. It’s important to get started, set a long-term goal, and communicate this to a company like LCA.no. Every day, at least 2,000 products are calculated in our generator. We now have a calculation time per product of approximately 10 seconds, and speed is no longer an issue! Not everyone chooses to work with this level of detail, but we see it as a major advantage.
The pace at which many companies still work, with one EPD at a time on a consultancy basis, will not be sustainable now that, for example, the Digital Product Passport is coming. It will be very difficult to bid on projects, for example, if you cannot produce EPDs accurately and quickly.
– For us, this process and the use of the EPD Generator have made us very well-prepared for the arrival of the Digital Product Passport. Our extensive use of order-specific EPDs underlines our commitment to transparency and a proactive approach to environmental requirements. It also underlines the importance of choosing the right partners and utilizing innovative solutions to meet future challenges in sustainability, circularity, and digitalization, he concludes.
