Purpose

Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) have a significant potential for contributing to consumption-based approaches to climate change. This paper provides an important building block towards a theoretical model of the factors accounting for variations in the availability of life cycle data across countries. It does so by positing a mechanism linking industry associations’ institutional role within environmental policy processes to the availability of product life data and by empirically validating it.

Methods

Interviews, qualitative document analysis, web scraping, quantitative text analysis, set-theoretical causal reasoning, and process tracing.

Results and discussion

Environmental policies that stipulate industry-government deliberations and assign a coordinating or mediating role to industry peak associations can stimulate the exchange of environmental information among industrial sectors. The policy instruments of determination of ‘best available techniques’ (BAT) towards standard setting, negotiated collective agreements and carbon pricing all contribute towards the institutionalisation of organised information exchange within industry. This lowers transaction costs for the monitoring, reporting and verification of sectoral environmental data and can thus be conducive to the creation of sectoral life cycle assessment data, with positive knock-on effects on the availability of firm- and product-specific LCA labels.

Conclusions

Industry associations’ institutional role within environmental policy processes can partially explain cross-national variations in the availability of product life cycle inventories.

中文翻译：

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部门对环境政策的协调响应如何提高产品生命周期数据的可用性

目的

环境产品声明（EPD）和产品碳足迹（PCF）在推动基于消费的气候变化方法方面具有巨大潜力。本文为解释各国生命周期数据可用性变化因素的理论模型提供了重要的基础。通过建立将行业协会在环境政策过程中的机构角色与产品寿命数据的可用性联系起来并通过经验验证的机制，可以做到这一点。

方法

面试，定性文档分析，网页抓取，定量文本分析，集合理论因果推理和过程跟踪。

结果和讨论

规定行业政府讨论并赋予行业高峰协会协调或调解作用的环境政策，可以促进工业部门之间环境信息的交换。确定“最佳现有技术”（BAT）以制定标准，谈判达成的集体协议和碳定价的政策工具都有助于行业内有组织的信息交换的制度化。这降低了用于监视，报告和验证部门环境数据的交易成本，因此有利于创建部门生命周期评估数据，并对公司和特定于产品的LCA标签的可用性产生了积极的连锁影响。

结论

行业协会在环境政策流程中的机构作用可以部分解释产品生命周期清单可用性中的跨国差异。