Choosing

PCF, LCA, EPD or DPP — which do you actually need?

These four get used interchangeably in requests, and they are not interchangeable. What follows is what each one answers, what it costs to produce, and which of them we produce today.

PCF, LCA, EPD or DPP — which do you actually need?
	PCF Product carbon footprint	LCA Life cycle assessment	EPD Environmental product declaration	DPP Digital product passport
The question it answers	What is one unit of this product worth in CO₂e?	What are this product's environmental impacts, across categories?	What is the published, comparable environmental profile of this product?	What is this specific product made of, and where did it come from?
Impacts covered	Climate change only	Multiple — water, acidification, resources…	Multiple, fixed by the category rules	Whatever the product group's rules require
Expressed per	Functional unit	Functional unit	Declared unit	Individual item or batch
Third-party verification	Not required	Not required	Required	Depends on the delegated act
Governed by	ISO 14067	ISO 14040 / 14044	ISO 14025 + product category rules	ESPR and its delegated acts
What usually triggers it	A customer questionnaire, CBAM, CSRD reporting	Design decisions, internal comparison	A construction tender or a buyer that requires one	Regulation, once your product group is covered
Who reads it	Your customer, your auditor	Your own engineers	The market, publicly	Anyone who scans the product
Machine-readable by default	No	No	Partly	Yes — that is the point
Hardest part	Supplier data for purchased inputs	Licensed inventory databases	Verification cost and time	Knowing your own supply chain per item
What we produce today	Yes — the free calculator here, and the audited engine in the platform.	Carbon is live. The multi-impact engine is built but not fed: it needs an inventory database we do not license.	No. We produce the assessment an EPD is built from; we are not a verification body and do not issue declarations.	Yes — a signed, verifiable product record. Whether it satisfies a given delegated act depends on that act.

None of these is a substitute for the others, and a supplier asked for one has occasionally been sent another. If a customer's request is unclear, the useful question back is which of the four questions above they are trying to answer.