Prod­uct seals‚ qual­i­ty labels or seals of qual­i­ty are des­ig­nat­ed as cer­tifi­cates for prod­ucts, pro­vid­ing graph­ic or writ­ten prod­uct iden­ti­fiers that cer­ti­fy the qual­i­ty of a prod­uct, for exam­ple, regard­ing safe­ty cri­te­ria adhered to, or prod­uct con­tents. Cer­tifi­cates are an eval­u­a­tion of a prod­uct. The EPD does not pro­vide these, because it pro­vides quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion about the char­ac­ter­is­tics and envi­ron­men­tal effects of a prod­uct and makes these trans­par­ent, with­out mak­ing eval­u­a­tive statements.
This dif­fer­ence, as com­pared to tra­di­tion­al envi­ron­men­tal labels and cer­tifi­cates or seals of qual­i­ty, is con­scious­ly nor­ma­tive­ly reg­u­lat­ed with EPDs, since, here, a life cycle assess­ment with a mul­ti­tude of indi­ca­tors is shown, which can­not be sum­marised in a sin­gle eval­u­a­tive state­ment. For instance, an EPD does not test the prod­uct for spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics, such as mate­r­i­al con­tent or emis­sions, as is the case in lab­o­ra­to­ries. On the con­trary, ver­i­fi­ca­tion exam­ines whether the data pro­vid­ed by the man­u­fac­tur­er in its EPD are plau­si­ble and com­plete with regard to applic­a­ble stan­dards and rules.