openEPD is an open standard for interconnecting EPD databases at scale. It is owned and incubated by WAP Sustainability. Our intent is to institute a process where the standard is managed by a broad set of stakeholders.

openEPD was originally created by Phil Northcott at C-Change Labs to offer an open, public API for digital services using EPDs to connect to BuildingTransparency’s EC3 database, and to each other.

We had originally hoped to use an existing standard like ILCD+EPD, but we soon found that, while generating documents that way was easy, compiling and using EPDs from multiple sources required implementing the variant of ILCD+EPD used by each system, and laborious deduplication.

We based openEPD on the widely used openAPI standard, and focused on making the data well structured, unambiguous, and easy to verify, so that any system can use digital EPDs without excessive effort.

We hope that’s why you are here: to make digital EPDs as cheap, reliable, and verifiable as a mobile boarding pass or an e-transfer.