The IGBC launched the EPD Ireland project on Friday 9 December.
The EPD Ireland project will allow suppliers and manufacturers to develop and upload their 3rd party verified EPD on a national platform. The project will involve the development of the National Methodology for preparing an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) in line with EN15804 so that these are recognised across Europe. Ireland to date has not had an EPD programme as operated successfully in other European countries such as IBU in Germany, Inies France, EPD Norway.
EPD are considered the building blocks of Life Cycle Assessment of buildings (LCA) and are the key information needed for professionals to calculate impacts at the construction stage. The embodied impacts of buildings are expected to increase to more than 50% of overall lifecycle impacts once the NZEB standard comes into place after 2018 when the operational impacts are greatly reduced.
This is IGBC’s first step in an overall business plan to mainstream the calculation of the embodied impacts of buildings and consider these as part of overall Life Cycle assessment across all stages of the building.
As part of this programme IGBC also organised last week the first formal training of construction professionals in carrying out LCA of buildings to the European standards EN 15978. This was delivered by Bionova the Finnish company responsible for the leading LCA software on the market.
IGBC Home Performance Index awards credits for the use of EPD and the calculation of LCA, like the main sustainability assessment systems used in Ireland BREEAM and LEED. This is intended to make it easier for sustainability professionals to achieve these credits.
Pat Barry CEO of the Irish Green Building Council stated: “We hope to mainstream the assessment of the full impacts of construction over the next number of years”.
Any manufacturers or suppliers interested in having their EPD hosted on the platform are asked to contact IGBC [email protected]
This initiative is been part funded by the EPA under their Green Enterprise programme.
