Efficiency has a wide variety of meanings but we can define it as the ratio between the production rate and the delivery rate. For the construction industry, optimise resource efficiency means that over its whole life-cycle, a building delivers the required services to the owner/occupier by using the minimum resources.
In 2010, the European Commission (EC) published its EU 2020 strategy that offered a path for the European economy with smart, sustainable and inclusive growth as its main priorities.
The EC then released its Resource efficiency roadmap as a follow up in September 2011. One of the recommendations was to complement existing buildings energy efficiency policies with resource efficiency policy.
After much delay, the EC finally published “Resource efficiency opportunities in the building sector” in July 2014 and limited the scope of their Communication to the environmental performance of residential and non-residential buildings; industrial buildings and infrastructure having been excluded from the scope.
The Communication promotes a number of scenarios to achieve a reduction in the environmental impacts of buildings. These include improved manufacturing, project design and planning. These would be combined with deconstruction, recycling and reuse policies. This vision implies that all actors in the construction chain have a part to play to achieve the resource efficiency target, which indeed seems to be quite a sound approach.
The European construction products industry has been delivering Environmental Performance Declarations (EPDs) on a voluntary basis for many years. EPDs provide information on our products’ potential environmental impacts of over their life cycle.
Resource efficiency is at the heart of our industry. Saving resources and energy is good for the environment but also makes good business sense. However, it is worth underlining the fact that products are resource efficient when you consider their full life cycle in real applications.
Therefore, if we were now to shift the focus to evaluation of resource efficiency of construction products, we may miss out on some of the best environmental solutions provided by the industry.
CEN Technical Committee (TC) 350 is responsible for the development of voluntary horizontal standardised methods for the assessment of the sustainability aspects of new and existing construction works and for standards for the environmental product declaration of construction products.
This year, the TC celebrates its ten’s anniversary and we are pleased to read that the EC framework development will be based on its published standards.
As it aims to transform the EU into a more competitive, resource-efficient economy, the Commission should soon present a new circular economy strategy and waste targets legislation. A wide range of economic sectors will be implicated by these changes, including the construction and waste industries.
On 25 June, the EC Stakeholder Conference included six thematic split-up sessions, one of which focused on markets for secondary raw materials. Under this heading the themes discussed were value chain cooperation/agreements; matching demand and supply needs and regulatory obstacles, such as unclear (end-of-) waste/product status.
With so many important topics coming up for discussion at European level, we will all benefit from the share knowledge and expertise held by our industries. The second EDA think tank that will be held in Brussels soon is a perfect example of how to develop shared input for the European Institutions. We look forward to taking part.
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