EPD stands for Environmental Product Declaration and LCA stands for Life Cycle Assessment. Both are methods used to evaluate the environmental impact of a product or process throughout its life cycle.
Eco-costs are a way of expressing the environmental impact of a product or process in monetary terms. To translate EPDs or LCAs into eco-costs, you would need to follow these general steps:
Identify the relevant environmental impact categories for the product or process being evaluated. These may include things like greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and waste generation.
Assign environmental impacts to each impact category based on the results of the EPD or LCA. For example, if the LCA found that the product emits 10 kg of CO2e per unit produced, this impact would be assigned a value in eco-costs.
Convert the environmental impacts into monetary values using an established methodology.
Sum up the monetary values for each impact category to arrive at a total eco-cost for the product or process.
Sustainability Impact Metrics established a methodology for the third step described above. More information about how EPD / LCA are converted can be found here: https://www.ecocostsvalue.com/lca/eco-costs-estimate-epds/
Therefore, it is possible to use existing EPDs and LCAs for the classification method of Pickler. However, it is important to note that the translation of EPDs or LCAs into eco-costs involves a lot of assumptions and uncertainties.