LCA, VOC, EPD: what they measure and where to find them
Three terms show up constantly around sustainable materials, and they get used almost interchangeably. They shouldn't be. Each measures something different, and confusing them makes it easy to either overclaim or underclaim what a product actually does.
LCA: what it cost to make
A Life Cycle Assessment maps a product's environmental impact from raw material to end of life: energy use in production, materials, transport, what happens when the product is eventually recycled or incinerated. Without LCA, the term "sustainable" is a claim about the wood. With one, it's a claim about the whole production process, which is usually where the impact actually sits, not in the material itself but in what gets added to it.
An LCA follows a product through three phases, each with its own set of data. Production sits in group A, use in group B, end of life in groups C and D. For Decospan's panels, the assessment focuses on A1-A3 and C and D, production and end of life, rather than the use phase, which is measured separately through VOC testing instead. The Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), built on that LCA, turns those findings into a verified number covering the whole product build-up, checked by an independent third party rather than reported by Decospan alone. Both sit behind everything that follows.
One clarification worth making: wood itself doesn't release CO2. A tree absorbs and stores carbon while it grows, and only gives it back if it's burned. So an LCA isn't measuring the wood. It's measuring everything else around it.
Where the impact actually sits
For Decospan's MDF-core panels, Shinnoki, Querkus, and Nuxe, that measurement points somewhere specific: the carrier board, not the veneer, drives most of the environmental impact across most categories. That doesn't hold for every category, though. For climate impact specifically, production alone is close to carbon-negative, but the balance shifts once end-of-life incineration is factored in, since burning the wood releases the carbon it had stored. Which of those two stages ends up dominating isn't a fixed number. It depends on what actually happens to the panel at the end of its lifetime.
Decospan publishes the Life Cycle Assessment for each product on the download section of our website, alongside the resulting EPD for a selection of our products. The LCA is the detailed calculation, showing exactly which materials and production stages contribute to each impact category, which is where a finding like the carrier-versus-veneer split actually comes from.
VOC: what it releases once it's installed
This is a separate measurement entirely, and it isn't part of the LCA's calculations at all. An LCA can look excellent on paper and still says nothing about the air inside the finished room, which is exactly why indoor air emissions are tracked independently. What a product costs to produce and what it releases into a room afterwards are two different things, and only one of them is about the people actually using the space.
Formaldehyde and broader VOC emissions are tested and reported as two separate parameters, not one as a subcategory of the other, and results are typically given at more than one point in time, a few days after installation and again several weeks later, since emissions change as materials off-gas.
The formaldehyde emission class is stated on each product's Technical Info sheet, available per product in the download section. The full VOC test results, reported at those multiple time intervals, are mentioned in the EPD itself, one level more detailed than the headline classification.
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EPD: whether any of this can be checked
An unverified claim and a verified one can look identical on a spec sheet. That's the gap an Environmental Product Declaration is built to close: it's built on the LCA data, so the production-impact side of the story lives inside it, and it carries the formaldehyde and VOC results alongside it as supporting evidence. Choosing to have an EPD is a voluntary choice to be checked rather than simply taken at their word, different from a declaration like CE marking, which every product needs regardless.
Decospan invests in these labels and the LCA calculations behind them because they create a quantitative, controlled base, something to actually build a discussion on rather than argue from opinion. That base feeds directly into where innovation goes next, and it means the groundwork is already there for when the market is ready to shift towards more sustainable products.
Independently verified, rather than self-reported, it's an outside check that the LCA behind it was actually done correctly, not just a company publishing its own numbers.
After Parky, we have established new EPDs in 2025 for our strategic veneer product collections: Shinnoki, Querkus, Nuxe and flooring brand Esco.
Decospan's EPDs are published per product category and are available in the different download sections. Each one states its declared unit, scope, and validity period explicitly, worth checking against the specific product being specified rather than assumed to cover the whole range.
The bigger picture
These three sit inside a larger structure: the Corporate Sustainability Report, where sourcing, emissions, and verified footprints come together across the whole company, targets met and not yet met both included, rather than staying scattered product by product.
