Assessing environmental impacts of active fire protection and egress systems using environmental product declarations: A review

Integrating fire-safety measures in buildings are widely recognized as essential for minimizing fire risks and the associated environmental impacts. Comprehensive environmental impact assessments of buildings must extend system boundaries to include technical installations, encompassing fire-safety protection systems. However, designers and stakeholders currently lack consistent, comparable data for these systems, making it difficult to assess their environmental performance during the early design stages. With an increasing number of countries mandating life-cycle assessments (LCAs) for buildings, there will be a growing need for accessible data on fire-safety measures derived from Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). This study investigates data availability and the quality of environmental data for Active Fire Protection (AFP) and Egress (ME) systems using EPDs, which are often the most accessible and standardized sources of such data. Significant variation exists in the reporting and outcomes of EPDs. To ensure comparability across EPDs, this research employs data harmonization, aligning classification criteria and normalizing environmental data based on the functional performance of AFP and ME products. The analysis covers 157 third-party verified EN 15804 EPDs, representing 393 products, primarily from European manufacturers. Significant data gaps exist across 24 out of 32 categories of AFP and ME. Emergency lighting systems (52 %) and fire dampers (31 %) are the most frequently represented systems in the EPDs, while these two systems together with fire curtains exhibit the highest data dispersion across impact categories, complicating comparisons. Life-cycle stages A1–A3 were found to contribute most to the overall environmental impact across all systems. This underscores the value of integrating fire-safety EPDs into early-stage design decisions, where material and system choices have the greatest influence. Further research is required to improve the consistency and comparability of EPDs and to refine the impact calculations based on product specificity and functional performance.