19
UNECE/FAO Forest Products Annual Market Review, 2014-2015
2.5.2
Green building
Legislative measures are now in place across the EU with the aim of increasing the energy performance of buildings, notably the 2010 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive 2010/31/ EU (EPBD) and the 2012 Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27/EU (EED). The EED requires member states to establish long-term strategies for mobilizing investment in the renewal of national building stocks. The pace of introduction of these measures varies widely across the EU, but overall the market for energyefficient buildings is growing rapidly. Annual spending on energy-efficient buildings in Europe – including products and services – is forecast to grow from €41.4 billion ($56 billion) in 2014 to €80.8 billion ($109 billion) in 2023 (Navigant Research, 2014). A UNECE review of public policies to promote sustainable building materials in Europe concluded that there is widespread awareness of the environmental impacts of the construction sector and of the mitigation role of wood. Some European countries have established minimum consumption targets for wood use in new buildings, but these policies can be problematic, both for designers, who may feel compelled to use wood products in suboptimal situations, and for non-wood product manufacturers, who may perceive unfair procurement practices. Rather than identifying specific materials for special treatment, a more constructive approach would be to encourage policies based on life-cycle assessment, which is gradually becoming used more widely in the EU (UNECE, 2015). The European Commission’s Communication on Resource Efficiency Opportunities in the Building Sector, which was published in July 2014, identified a continuing lack of reliable, comparable and affordable data, methods and tools with which operators in the supply chain can analyse and benchmark environmental performance. To overcome this, the European Commission will collaborate with stakeholders to develop a framework of core indicators, including their underlying methods, to be used in assessing the environmental performance of EU buildings throughout their life cycles (European Commission, 2014b). LEED (“Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design”) is a building rating and certification programme developed by the US Green Building Council (USGBC). USGBC members approved version 4 (v4) of LEED in June 2013. This moves away from a prescriptive basis for green building and toward a performance basis, with greater emphasis on the end use of systematic lifecycle assessment-based tools and information. Although the changes in LEED v4 are potentially significant and may benefit wood products, the USGBC announced in October 2014 that projects will be able to continue to be registered under the current LEED 2009 standard until 31 October 2016. More than 57 thousand commercial projects participate in the LEED programme; as of October 2014, 253 projects were registered under LEED v4, and nine LEED v4 projects had been certified (Kaplow, 2014).
Research continues to support the carbon and climate benefits associated with the expanded use of wood building systems. In the US, the majority of homes are built primarily of wood, and the current inventory of wood structures in the US is estimated to store 1.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon (equivalent to 5.4 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide). Maximizing the use of wood in multi-family housing, low-rise residential construction and remodelling in the US could result in a carbon storage benefit of about 21 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, which is equivalent to taking 4.4 million automobiles off the road (Howe et al., 2015).
Source: APA, 2013.
2.5.3
Environmental product declarations
The ECO Platform, which is supported by 25 providers of environmental product declarations (EPDs) from 17 European countries, provides a common framework for constructionsector EPDs in Europe. The ECO Platform is working to harmonize national EPD systems based on the ISO 14025 standard for environmental declarations and the EN 15804 standard for construction-sector EPDs. The first ECO Platform EPDs aligned to the harmonized procedures were issued in October 2014. More than 180 ECO Platform EPDs had been issued by June 2015, including several for wood-panel and veneer products. As part of the EU’s “Single Market for Green Products” initiative, the European Commission has developed a harmonized methodology for product environmental footprints (PEF) based on the International Reference Life Cycle Data System Handbook as well as other existing standards and guides (including ISO 14040-44, PAS 2050, BP X30, WRI/WBCSD GHG protocol, Sustainability Consortium, and ISO 14025). The methodology is being tested in a range of product sectors, although only one (“intermediate paper product”) is related to forest products. A key part of the pilot phase is to engage industry interests in developing product environmental footprint category rules to provide specific guidance for calculating and reporting on the life-cycle environmental impacts of products (European Commission, 2015d). Concerns have been raised by the European building industry that the PEF methodology5, which is not based on EN 15804, may duplicate work already carried out to develop EPD standards and that efforts should be made to ensure that the
5
The Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) is a multi-criteria measure of the environmental performance of a good or service throughout its life cycle.