EeBGuide – public consultation – Have Your Voice Heard
The European Commission’s EeBGuide, the next-generation Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) online guide for buildings and building materials, is now entering a six week period of public consultation. Interested parties are invited to access the Consultation section of the project website between 19th June and 31st July 2012 in order to have their voices heard. The Energy Efficient Buildings Guide (EeBGuide) will be a free-to-use, needs-specific guide to the embodied environmental impacts of building materials and processes and the ongoing operational impacts from ‘cradle to grave’ of energy efficient buildings.
By following the EeBGuide users, including manufacturers of building products or developers of energy efficient buildings, will be able to prove that they care about our planet, giving formal approach to demonstrating their efforts to protect it in a robust, consistent and comparable manner. Outputs will include guidance on the assessment of the environmental efficiency of materials and the built environment; including energy consumption, impact on climate change, water-use, eutrophication potential, acidification and other key environmental indicators. The EeBGuide is likely to become the ‘line in the sand’ for sustainable development in Europe, and thus this public consultation stage is a vital element in the creation of a truly representative final version.
The EeBGuide project, financed by the European Commission, is a collaboration between Fraunhofer-Institut für Bauphysik (FhG-IBP), PE International, Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB), UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change (ESCI-UPF), Britain’s Building Research Establishment (BRE) and Prof Ch Sjöström Consultancy and is expected to be concluded in November 2012, just one year after its first meeting. An important source for much of the early input into the project comes from the ILCD Handbook and the new CEN/TC 350 standards rules, including EN 15804 (Environmental Performance on product level) and EN 15978 (Environmental Performance at the building level). It is also hoped that this guidance will be incorporated into pioneering initiatives such as BREEAM, DGNB and HQE; whose creators are also involved with the EeBGuide Project.
The six project partners have now completed the guidance document following feedback from European research organizations, universities, industries and construction companies and are now inviting input from all interested parties to have their voices heard.
Further information related to the EeBGuide project can be found on the regularly updated website: http://www.eebguide.eu/
