1. What are some of the most significant developments you have seen in your field over the past few years?

Today, 95% of our customers create EPDs with Emidat to win tenders and increase sales, not mainly to comply. Yet, the EU's Construction Products Regulation (CPR) is about to drive a much bigger wave of demand: the regulation will require it from 430,000 manufacturers, while only about 3,000 hold an EPD in Europe today. Non-compliance will cost up to €100,000 per product. While EPDs are often seen as a pure compliance case, our early customers already understood it's much more than that: an EPD is commercial infrastructure, a trusted, reusable record of a product's recipe, production process and suppliers, which feeds competitive benchmarking.

India is a clear example of the demand increasing outside Europe. The Indian Green Building Council's (IGBC) new Green New Buildings rating, mandatory from May 2026, requires quantified embodied-carbon data instead of a pass-or-fail label. The EU's carbon border tax (CBAM) is pushing Indian steel and cement exporters toward the same installation-level data, and India's own Green Steel Taxonomy already ranks producers by emissions intensity. Manufacturers like Tata Steel, JSW Cement and Saint-Gobain already publish EPDs years ahead of any domestic mandate, mainly to earn green-building certification credits and meet their own sustainability targets.

2. In your view, what are the biggest challenges organisations face when working with environmental or sustainability data?

The biggest challenge we see, across every industry, is sourcing product and process data to model EPDs for huge product portfolios. Most manufacturers could put together an EPD for one or two flagship products, but doing it for 100 products across multiple plants is another problem. The underlying production data, recipes, quantities, energy use, transport, sits scattered across ERP and PIM systems, spreadsheets, and people's heads rather than in one structured place. Aggregated with the help of a consultancy, EPD generation has cost €12,000–25,000 and taken 6–12 months per product.

That's what we are here to solve. Emidat automates the creation, verification, and management of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and Digital Product Passports (DPPs) for building material manufacturers. Manufacturers upload their production data in the format it's in (ERP exports, spreadsheets, or free text), through bulk upload or our API, directly connecting to their own systems. Our AI-native platform structures the data into a pre-verified product model, checked against a database of more than 130,000 published EPDs. This way, a first EPD takes only 4–6 weeks, and every one after that 1–2 weeks, enabling manufacturers to model huge product portfolios, at a fraction of the cost.

3. What key message or insight do you hope participants will take away from your session at ISC2026?

Really, it's what the panel title says: understanding what an EPD is, and what it is not.

It's a standardised, third-party verified report of a product's environmental footprint across its lifecycle, based on a full life cycle assessment from raw material extraction through manufacturing to end of life. It covers more than 30 environmental indicators, including carbon, water use, toxicity and biodiversity impact, all measured in a standardised way so one manufacturer's numbers can be compared against another's.

While third-party verification is key to officially publish an EPD, I actually want people to leave with one takeaway: a published EPD should not be the end goal. Once that data exists, structured and verified, it lets manufacturers win tenders against competitors, compete on environmental performance rather than price alone, and reuse the same data for a variety of use cases, across their own sales, marketing, and product teams. If you treat EPDs purely as a compliance box to tick, you'll miss most of its business value.