Environmental impacts of buildings and building products have raised an important issue besides the energy efficiency of buildings. It is estimated that the built environment causes approximately 40 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions annually. Greenhouse gas emissions are the most studied environmental impact in building product point of view. Several novel standards guide the environmental assessment work and give methodological boundaries for the assessments. The European standard series the Sustainable Construction Work guide assessment methods for the building and building product level assessment. The environmental product declaration (EPD) standard is developed for the product level assessment. And to define more specific rules for different material groups, there are product category rules standards under development.
Despite of all standardization work different assessment methods can and are still used for the environmental assessment of the building products. That leads to the situation were different datasets are not comparable with each other and cause confusion for users of the environmental datasets. One practical solution would be that wood product industry and interest groups agree on a common assessment method to unify assessments.
Keywords: Environmental product declaration, Greenhouse gas emissions, Wood-based products, Woodworking industry
Authors
Linkosalmi L.
Department of Forest Products Technology, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland
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