M10 AM Building Life-Cycle Capacity in the Greening of Buildings and Construction Consideration
Monday, 14 November 2005: 8:00 AM - 11:40 AM in 341-342

(JES-1117-831267) German architects views on lifecycle-related eco-labelling of construction products as a means of decision support.

Klingele, M.¹, Jeske, U.¹, Schebek, L.¹, ¹ Research Center Karlsruhe, Member of Helmholtz-Association, Institute for Technical Chemistry, Karlsruhe, Germany

ABSTRACT- The objective of IPP (integrated product policy) in the construction sector is development towards sustainable buildings with special emphasis on greening. For analysing and assessing the environmental performance of buildings, knowledge of environmental effects of construction products is required. On the other hand, analysis of construction products alone is not sufficient to assess the environmental effect of construction products in the context of the respective building. The environmental performance of a building may only be assessed on the basis of an eco-balance covering the complete building and incorporate the complete lifecycle. It may be affected mostly by the planners of buildings. They make or at least prepare decisions on functional and geometrical design solutions and on the choice of construction products which seem to be the crucial factors for the environmental performance of the construction phase and dispose the energy consumption and demand of maintenance of buildings as well. To support the planners in their sustainable approaches in the above-mentioned design decisions they need adequate environmental information and tools. Lifecycle-related eco-labelling of construction products as a means of communication between the levels of construction product and building could be one first step to serve this purpose. Its success results from the quality of labelling programmes based on the motivation of supplying enterprises and the acceptance by interested planners. To gain information about the interest of planners, a Germany-wide online survey is running, supported by the Federal Chamber of Architects and embedded in the activities of the German Network on Life Cycle Inventory Data. This survey covers the planning phase, building properties, construction product declaration, eco-balancing, and lifecycle data and tends to get insights about the contents and form of product declarations the planners deemed necessary and feasible to integrate into the building design process. Main results of the survey concerning the German architects position concerning LCA based decsion support, its integration into the design workflow and the reqired data will be presented at the meeting.

Key words: german building sector epd, architects, electronic survey, decison support