A milestone worth celebrating
Congratulations to KRAIBURG Relastec GmbH & Co. KG. In June 2026 the company from Salzwedel, Germany, published its first-ever Environmental Product Declarations: three of them, all issued by IBU, the Institut Bauen und Umwelt. All three cover floor coverings made mainly from recycled rubber granulate, so a product line whose pitch has always been "circular" can now prove it with numbers.
The timing is good. IBU had welcomed KRAIBURG Relastec as a new member in the third quarter of 2025, which means the company went from joining to publishing in less than a year. For a first try, that is a quick turnaround.
What the three EPDs actually cover
These are not single-SKU declarations. They are three average EPDs, split into Group 1, Group 2 and Group 3 of KRAIBURG Relastec's recycled rubber granulate flooring. Each group bundles several products, and they cover applications from SPORTEC fitness centre floors to EUROFLEX impact protection for playgrounds. The declared unit is 1 kg of flooring, and the Group 2 declaration notes that results scale linearly with thickness in millimetres. Specifiers can therefore work out the impact of a 10 mm mat or a 40 mm fall protection slab without guessing.
All three were written under IBU's floor coverings product category rules (Part B), with production at the Salzwedel site. The life cycle assessment behind them was prepared by EY denkstatt in Vienna, and all three are valid until June 2031.
Think of the grouping approach like a band releasing a greatest hits album rather than dozens of singles. One well-built declaration covers many related products, and that's often the smartest way for a broad portfolio to make its debut.
Join Parq Pulse!
Our weekly newsletter for manufacturers mobilizing product and environmental insights to remain competitive and win more projects.
Why a recycled rubber specialist needed this now
KRAIBURG Relastec is part of the KRAIBURG Holding. It takes in up to 60,000 tonnes of recycled raw materials a year and turns them into finished goods (KRAIBURG Relastec, 2025). Its brands span DAMTEC acoustic and vibration insulation, EUROFLEX fall protection, KRAITEC building protection, SPORTEC sports flooring and KOMFORTEX horse flooring. Customers include architects, landscape planners, sports facility operators, municipalities and contractors.
The catch is that recycled content alone doesn't count for much in a carbon calculation. When a project team models embodied carbon and a product has no product-specific EPD, they usually have to fall back on conservative generic data, sometimes with a penalty added on top. A third-party verified EPD gives them real numbers to use, which lowers the risk of the product being swapped out late in the project when carbon targets get tight.
How the competition stacks up
The closest peer is REGUPOL BSW, the German recycled rubber flooring maker. It has had one IBU EPD for its rolls and sheets since August 2023, valid into 2028. Its US arm, Regupol America, holds four current EPDs for its aktiv fitness flooring range. In North America, Ecore International leads by volume with 42 current EPDs, most of them issued through SCS Global Services in 2025. Dinoflex, the Canadian recycled rubber tile producer, has three current EPDs.
The picture changes elsewhere in the market. We could not find any EPDs in the EC3 directory for Gezolan, the Swiss recycled rubber surfacing specialist, or for Polytan, a major player in sports surfaces. In those head-to-heads KRAIBURG Relastec now has verified environmental data that the other side hasn't published.
So the debut works two ways. Against REGUPOL and Ecore it closes a gap and gives the company a fair shot at projects that require EPDs. Against competitors with no EPDs it is a head start, and in bids with carbon budgets that counts for a lot.
Room to grow the portfolio
The first wave covers flooring, but the product range goes well beyond it. DAMTEC impact sound and vibration insulation goes into buildings where acoustics and embodied carbon are now judged side by side. That makes it an obvious candidate for the next round. Sister company KRAIBURG PuraSys already holds two EPDs for vibration isolation products, which shows that demand exists in that segment.
None of this needs to be rushed. Still, having already built an LCA model with grouped product families makes the next round a lot easier. Much of the data collection groundwork, from utility bills to granulate supply chains, has already been done once.
Visibility is half the job
The good news on visibility: KRAIBURG Relastec features the EPDs on its English homepage, and its latest company brochure says EPDs are available for many products. The declarations are also downloadable from IBU's EPD-Online portal. For a debut, that is better than most manufacturers manage.
One issue every first-time publisher runs into is the lag between an EPD being issued by the program operator and it showing up in the global directories that architects and specifiers actually search. That delay often runs from several weeks to a few months, and during that time a valid EPD stays invisible to the people who would use it. With issuance in June and the declarations now discoverable, reducing that lag is worth planning for with the next batch. Teams who want to know how future EPDs can be listed within a day or two of publication are welcome to reach out to us directly.
Welcome to the transparency arena
KRAIBURG Relastec has spent decades turning old tyres into gym floors and playground surfaces. Now it has three IBU-verified declarations that back up that story with numbers. The company now competes on equal terms with REGUPOL, Ecore and Dinoflex, and it has an advantage over rivals like Gezolan and Polytan that have no EPDs listed yet. Being on the shortlist is no longer an issue. The opportunity now is to expand coverage to more of the range and to make sure every spec writer can find these EPDs quickly.
