Elia Rillo, a 36-year-old Italian engineer, has been elected chair of the Technical Committee of EPD International, the global reference program for registering Environmental Product Declarations. The announcement came on June 22, 2026, from Correggio, Italy.
An EPD is a certification of a product’s environmental impact. The figures behind it come from Life Cycle Assessment, a method that quantifies environmental effects across a product’s whole life.
A decade in the field
Rillo is a consultant and project manager. He has spent more than ten years at Studio Fieschi, a Turin-founded company that specializes in environmental sustainability, LCA and EPDs. Studio Fieschi is wholly owned by Tinexta Innovation Hub, the Tinexta Group unit that handles innovation, sustainability and digital transformation.
His degree is in Energy and Nuclear Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Turin. By the age of 32, according to the announcement, his work on sustainability and the circular economy had earned him a place on a European Community panel for the environmental sustainability assessment of products and services. The release calls him, at “not yet 40,” one of the most authoritative technical profiles in the field internationally.
Most of his work has been measuring the environmental impacts of products and organizations. He has helped companies and industrial supply chains with environmental reporting and with sustainability strategies built on scientific data.
The committee
Rillo joined the Technical Committee in 2025 and became its chair at the beginning of 2026. The announcement describes the step as international recognition of his technical expertise and of his ability to shape the rules for one of the most widely used tools for assessing products in public and private markets.
The committee has 14 members at present, three of them Italian. It is the technical and scientific steering body of the EPD system. Its job is to define and update methodological rules, assess regulatory developments and safeguard the scientific rigor of the program worldwide.
The program’s reach is large. More than 18,000 EPDs have been published by over 2,700 organizations in around 50 countries. According to the announcement, the committee’s decisions bear directly on industrial supply chains, public procurement criteria and company sustainability strategies.
