In April 2013, following the Sustainable Consumption and Production Action Plan (2008), the European Commission published a communication titled “Building the Single Market for Green Products – Facilitating Better Information on the Environmental Performance of Products and Organizations.” The aim was to harmonize existing measures to reduce industry costs, reduce confusion among consumers about environmental information, and increase product comparability. Specifically, the Commission released the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) Guide and the Organizational Environmental Footprint (OEF) Guide under the premise of the “Single Market for Green Products Initiative.” Since then, the PEF and OEF project, coordinated by the European Commission, has aimed to develop standard methods to measure and communicate products’ and organizations’ life cycle environmental performance.
The project, running from 2013, has seen two phases: the pilot phase (2013-2018) and the transition phase (2019-2024).
During the pilot phase of the project (2013-2018), the PEF/OEF methods were tested by 27 different industry sectors, and about 20 Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs) and Organisation Environmental Footprint Sectoral Rules (OEFSRs) were developed. To apply these sets of rules for calculating the PEF/OEF profile of a product/organization, the processes used require both primary (company-specific) and secondary (background) data. While the primary data will be produced by the organization applying the PEFCR/OEFSR (or one of their suppliers as specified in the PEFCR/OEFSR), the secondary datasets will be available to the final user through free dedicated nodes.
Currently, the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF) projects are in their transition phase (2019-2024). During this phase, before policies regarding environmental footprinting are adopted, the implementation of sets of rules established (PEFCRs) is monitored, the rules are expanded, and the background data developed are updated and expanded.