New guidance note: Take-back Guarantee in Environmental Declarations
Stichting NMD publishes a guidance note for the application of take-back guarantees when preparing environmental declarations. The guidance note provides further clarification on chapter 2.6.3.9 of the Environmental Performance Assessment Method for Construction Works and offers LCA practitioners and LCA reviewers a consistent working method. As such, this guidance note contributes to a consistent and reproducible application of take-back guarantees in practice.
When preparing environmental declarations, a take-back guarantee is sometimes used to substantiate an alternative end-of-life scenario. Its application regularly raises questions in practice: when may a return system be taken into account, and what conditions must it meet?
This raises a clear question in practice: is a take-back guarantee in itself sufficient to apply a more favourable end-of-life scenario?
What is changing now?
With this guidance note, there is now a consistent working method for assessing and applying take-back guarantees. This means:
- An alternative end-of-life scenario may only be applied if the return system is demonstrably functioning and meets all stipulated conditions
- Functioning, scalability, logistics, economic incentives, technical processing capacity and sales market must be demonstrable and plausible, with current practice as the starting point
- The take-back percentage applied must be consistent with what is actually taken back in current practice
- Mandatory statement in the explanatory notes to the environmental declaration of the take-back percentage, reuse percentage and the K-factor applied
The guidance note works in two steps:
- Determining what percentage of the product is actually returned via the return system
- Determining what part of that can demonstrably be reused or recycled
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