Bombardier has published an environmental product declaration (EPD) for its Challenger 650 aircraft and now has one in place for its full suite of in-production aircraft. The publication of the EPD, which provides an analysis of the environmental impact of a product throughout the life cycle, comes almost a year ahead of the Canadian manufacturer’s goal to have them in place for its entire in-production aircraft portfolio by 2025.
Bombardier paved new ground in the business jet sector with the initial EPD it secured for the Global 7500 in 2020. The EPD was developed through the International EPD System, which has a library of declarations for products from more than 30 countries in an attempt to foster transparency about environmental life cycles. Third-party verified to international ISO standards, the EPD discloses detailed information about a product from raw material to end-of-life, including details such as CO2 emissions, noise, water consumption, and other key environmental impact indicators.
Since 2020, Bombardier has been adding EPDs for each of its business jets—the Challenger 3500 followed in 2022 and then the Global 5500 and 6500 last year.
“The role of EPDs is not to stamp our aircraft as more sustainable than others—rather, to take ownership of the environmental impact they generate,” explained Jean-Christophe Gallagher, executive v-p of aircraft sales and Bombardier Defense. “For clients, these reports can be easily consulted like any other spec document. The same way we provide factual information about the unmatched width of the Challenger 650 aircraft’s cabin in its category or its leading dispatch reliability, Bombardier publicly provides factual information on the environmental impact of its business jets.”
Gallagher added that EPDs can further serve as a reference guide for the industry to target improvement areas. Bombardier called the EPDs an integral part of an overarching strategy to minimize the environmental footprint of the company and its products and help the industry achieve its long-term goals on that front.