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Typing an EPD into the Library by hand means transcribing several hundred numbers across four indicator tables. Extract From PDF reads the document instead and fills the form for you, leaving you to check the result rather than key it in. It sits at the top right of the Create Material form, on both the Published and Custom tabs.

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Run an extraction

Click Extract From PDF and choose the EPD document.
Extracting from PDF dialog explaining that it takes about 15 to 60 seconds, with a cancel button.

Reading the document

Extraction takes roughly 15–60 seconds depending on the document. Cancel stops it and leaves the form as it was.

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Check what came back

The form comes back populated — name, life time, owner, data source, description, publication and validity dates, EPD type and specification, declared and mass values with their units, and the indicator tables.
Create Material form filled in after extraction, with general details, description, EPD specification, and EPD units populated from the document.

The form after extraction

Anything the extraction could not find stays empty and flagged, so the gaps are easy to spot before you save. Work down the form and compare it against the document, paying most attention to: Then Create Material as usual.

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How reliable is it?

Real-Time LCA published its own testing in Introducing AI-enabled EPD import: across roughly 10,000 values from 35 test files, the extraction returned 98% of the values correctly, with 11 individual entries wrong. The remaining values were either missing or flagged as potential errors for a human to review. That accuracy comes from a neuro-symbolic approach — generative AI does the reading, and symbolic rules reason over the output to catch hallucinations. The rules detect mismatches; they do not remove them.
Extraction is an accelerator, not a substitute for checking. A wrong indicator value is invisible once the material is in the Library — it simply produces a wrong answer in every project that maps to it. Review the form against the source document before saving.
For how Real-Time LCA handles AI features generally, see Transparency and privacy.

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Next steps

Verified EPDs

What each field on the Published form means, field by field.

Browse materials

Find the material once it is saved, and check it in the detail panel.