What is a FDES?

In French, the acronym FDES stands for "Fiche de déclaration environnementale et sanitaire". In English, this means 'Environmental and Health Declaration Sheet'.

What is a FDES?

An Environmental and Health Declaration Sheet (FDES) is the daily focus of our Construction team.

The FDES serves as an 'environmental ID card' for a construction product or material in the building sector (PMCB). More specifically, the FDES is a standardised document that presents two elements:

• The results of the life cycle assessment (LCA) of a product, 'from cradle to grave', that is, from the extraction of raw materials to its end of life;
• Health information.

These elements are used to calculate the environmental and health performance of a building for its eco-design.

The FDES is governed by the NF EN 15804+A2 standard and its national supplement NF EN 15804/CN, as well as the entire set of regulations of the French verification programme INIES.

The FDES, the French equivalent of the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) or Product Environmental Declaration (PED), includes not only environmental information but also health data, distinguishing it from the PED, which is limited to environmental aspects.

Why create an FDES?

FDES are required to perform life cycle assessments (LCA) for new buildings under the RE2020, the Environmental Regulation 2020, which has been in force since January 2022.

It provides professionals, including project owners, architects, and engineering firms, with standardised information to calculate the environmental performance of a building.

All FDES are available on the INIES database (the French national reference database for environmental and health data on construction products and equipment). This database is managed collaboratively by construction industry stakeholders, including public authorities.

An FDES is also legally required whenever a product is promoted for its environmental characteristics in communications.

FDES and eco-design

When creating an FDES, the first step is to perform an LCA of the product in question and thus calculate the environmental impact results in accordance with the aforementioned standard.

This process allows manufacturers to:

• Identify the main environmental issues and hotspots of their product;
• Engage in an eco-design approach to improve the environmental performance of the product.

This process is iterative. Today, the creation and publication of many FDES are driving all stakeholders in the value chain to engage in optimisation and improvement processes for the environmental performance of their products.

At the end of this process, an FDES for the eco-designed product is necessary to highlight the environmental characteristics of the new product.

Different types of FDES

Several types of FDES can be distinguished:

• Collective FDES cover the same type of products manufactured by several companies grouped within a collective. This solution, among other things, helps to optimise costs;
• Individual FDES cover one product or several products manufactured by one company;
• 'Parametrisable' FDES are individual or collective declarations that can be parameterised to apply to different products based on the same LCA model. They require the creation of a configurator.

Finally, there are 'custom' or site-specific FDES. According to INIES, 'certain configurators allow the generation of this type of FDES, enabling the calculation of an FDES tailored to the product used on a specific site. These FDES are only valid for a particular project. They are not stored in the INIES database.'

The future: facilitating the creation of FDES

The major challenge for construction industry stakeholders is to obtain relevant, reliable, and verified environmental data that enables the most accurate calculation of a building's carbon footprint.

One trend we are observing is the provision of configurators tailored to manufacturers, offering multiple product configurations and optimising the creation of FDES.

EVEA has been contributing to this trend for 10 years by providing software tools aimed at enabling manufacturers to gain autonomy and speed in creating FDES. For example, the fifth version of our Ev-DEC solution is used today to facilitate the creation of individual FDES for a product or range of products.

Other even more customised solutions have recently been developed for specific manufacturers or groups of manufacturers. ■