November 2025 EPD News, Region by Region
November delivered a flurry of EPD moves that matter commercially. LEED v5 opened for project certification, Europe advanced its data plumbing, France’s INIES kept swelling, and new program licenses landed in the Middle East and North Africa. Use this snapshot to decide where to focus your specs and which product lines need declarations first. The payoff is simple, you stay in more bids and avoid carbon penalties that knock you out before price even comes up.
United States
LEED v5 is now open for project certification, and USGBC published more than 20 new calculators to smooth documentation. That means faster proof when your product-specific EPD unlocks material credits and decarb pathways in bids (CAGBC, 2025). New York’s Buy Clean Concrete policy continues to bite. Starting January 1, 2025, all concrete mixes on covered State agency projects must carry EPDs that document GWP against State limits, so suppliers without EPDs are sidelined by default (OGS, 2025).
What this means commercially is clear. Teams need defensible, third-party verified EPDs at the mix, mill, or plant level to avoid defaulting to pessimistic assumptions that can cost you the spec.
Canada
LEED v5 conversations dominated November, with regional summits and training ramping. CAGBC’s Zero Carbon Building v4 continues to steer owners toward embodied-carbon reductions, which elevates the importance of facility-specific EPDs for concrete, steel, glass, and insulation. If you sell into public work, watch for federal standard updates that increasingly reference whole-building LCA and product-level EPDs.
European Union
The ECO Platform migration hit its final mile. The new ECO Portal went live with a three-month transition window starting September 1 2025. If your declarations or tools still point to the legacy portal, update links and any API workflows now as ECO phases out the old endpoints.
Netherlands’ NMD tightened inputs this year. From July 1 2025, NMD “set 2” (EN 15804+A2) submissions must use ecoinvent 3.9.1 for inclusion, so check your background data and re-run LCAs if needed to keep listings current (NMD, 2025).
United Kingdom and Ireland
PAS 2080 continues to spread through infrastructure procurement, raising expectations that supply chains document and cut capital carbon, not just operational loads. For manufacturers, that translates into EPDs with transparent scenarios and credible transport and energy inputs. It also means faster data responses when clients run comparative LCAs at tender.
France
INIES crossed a symbolic milestone in November and, as of early December, lists over 5,400 FDES and more than 1,700 PEP, representing more than 300,000 commercial references. If France is on your roadmap, being present in INIES is no longer optional for RE2020 projects. The upshot is practical. Without an INIES-published FDES or PEP, design teams will default to conservative data that makes your product look worse on paper than it performs in reality.
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Nordics
IBU increased its verification fee to €2,700 effective September 1 2025, citing a 40 % rise in external verifier costs and growing submission volumes. Budget your 2026 renewal cycles accordingly and bundle related EPDs to capture the multi-EPD cost optimizations IBU offers (IBU, 2025).
Nordic headlines mixed practicality with momentum. Program operators held member events and continued pushing tool support. Take note if your sales teams hear more requests for “prospective” EPDs in early product launches. Those are recognised in some programs, then updated once a full year of production data exists.
Asia Pacific
China’s EPD activity kept building. EPD China and international programme operators are expanding tools and verifier capacity for local manufacturers. For export-oriented manufacturers, aligning on EN 15804+A2 indicators remains the safest path for EU acceptance.
India saw an EPD-Norway collaboration with Greenex announced November 24, another sign that South Asian manufacturers are moving from interest to publication partnerships.
Middle East and Africa
New licenses landed in November. The International EPD System welcomed EPD Saudi Arabia on November 25 and EPD Tunisia on November 19, expanding local publishing options and verification capacity. That reduces friction for regional suppliers who previously relied on Europe-based operators for every step (EPD International, 2025).
Latin America
With COP30 in Belém in mid-November, embodied-carbon language showed up across side events and procurement conversations. Expect more owners to ask for product-specific EPDs as a precondition for demonstrating progress toward project or portfolio carbon targets. If you sell steel, cement, or glass into the region, sharpen your plant data and transport modeling now.
Frequently Asked Questions
What changed in LEED v5 in November 2025 that affects EPD documentation?
USGBC added more than 20 new LEED v5 calculators and published addenda on November 3 to streamline documentation across credits, which can cut time spent proving product contributions (CAGBC, 2025).
Is INIES now essential for selling into France under RE2020?
Yes. INIES reported 5,391 FDES and 1,753 PEP as of December 1, 2025, and it is the default data source tools pull from for RE2020 modeling, so having your FDES or PEP there protects your spec (INIES, 2025).
Did ECO Platform actually switch portals in November?
Yes. The new ECO Portal ran in parallel from September 1 to November 30, with legacy deactivation on December 1, 2025. Update any hard‑coded links or API calls (ECO Platform, 2025).
What EU data rules should we check before renewing EPDs in 2026?
For Netherlands NMD inclusion, A2 submissions must use ecoinvent 3.9.1 from July 1, 2025 onward. Align your background datasets now to avoid rework at verification (NMD, 2025).
Any price signals from program operators we should budget for?
IBU raised its verification fee to €2,700 effective September 1, 2025, citing about a 40% rise in external verifier costs since 2016. Consider batching related EPDs to leverage IBU’s multi‑EPD efficiencies (IBU, 2025).
About the Author
With a passion for sustainability and a love for complex data, Toby helps manufacturers efficiently collect data from across their organization and get their EPDs done right. He’s especially interested in how AI can support human expertise, helping R&D and factory teams work faster, smarter, and with less friction.
