Web based EPD-tool for evaluation of contractors’ design

This article proposes using of current EN standards and verification rules for environmental product declaration (EPDs) as a basis for evaluation of contractors’ design for infrastructural projects. The proposed conceptual framework for verification of credibility of climate impact assessment for infrastructural projects is based on the Swedishbased, the International EPD® System. Several Swedish and Norwegian stakeholders were engaged in this joint project to understand driving forces and obstacles and provide key insights to the successful implementation on such verification framework for evaluation and comparison of alternative design options. In order to perform a sharp test of some main hypothesizes, about how it’s possible to create verified climate calculations four of the project participants collected data from ongoing infrastructural projects and tested to perform project-specific verified climate calculations. and the way to model the entire life cycle the results will be incomparable. At present LCAs and climate calculations aren’t standardized and are performed in different ways, in different commercial LCA-software with different LCA-methods by different players in the Swedish construction industry. An industry-wide standardized basis would make it possible to create an unbroken information flow with LCA-data between material suppliers, contractors and clients. A common ground would allow the use of the same LCA-calculation model for various purposes such as company’s internal monitoring of the climate performance in infrastructural projects, internal product development, purchasing, monitoring for the environmental management system, public procurement, creation of business strategies, reporting according to building assessment schemes (BREEAM, LEED, DGNB etc) and reporting to clients. The current lack of a reliable industry wide-used LCA-calculation model and a verification procedure for project specific life cycle data is anticipated to become an important barrier to design and sell products with improved environmental performance. At the same time, Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building materials and building parts, based on LCA, have been increased at the Nordic market during last years. Many manufactures have been developed EPDs for their products. However the “middle” chain in the communication between the manufactures and the client, the contractor hasn’t started yet produce verified LCAs in EPD-format for infrastructural projects. There is still no general acceptance of EPDs as an industry-wide LCA-specification. Knowledge and experience of using such standardized climate calculations according to the EPD-format is still very low. In Sweden, the STA starts to encourage contractors to use projectspecific EPDs as a verification of project’s climate impact since the spring 2016 (Trafikverket, 2016). Product-specific EPDs are also required for public procurement in some bigger Norwegian projects (Johannessen, 2016) and building assessment schemes (LEED, BREEAM etc). EPD is in the broad sense a market driven format for communication of LCA based environmental information business-to-business and more recently also business-to-consumer. A key component in LCA in EPD-format is a method description document, referred to as Product Category Rules (PCR). A PCR defines the LCA-model, calculation method and data requirement (The International EPD System, 2016). PCRs are available for engineering constructions (e g bridges) and construction materials. However each PCR is linked to a particular EPD-program operator (e g EPD Norway or the International EPD® System in Sweden). EPDs from different operators aren’t comparable yet. The calculation rules of carbon dioxide emissions differ between the current EPD-systems in Europe, which can be misleading when comparing products and processes. However it already addressed within the framework of the EPD/PCR and also for the ongoing work in the EUproject (Eco-Platform, 2016). The contractors and material suppliers start climate optimization of their product/solution as well as optimization of supply chain often as a part of an internal strategical work with energy and climate reduction. An innovative climate-efficient solution is often created by contractors long before the actual bidding process. Verified LCAs and climate calculations, performed in EPD-format will support contractor’s internal work with the supply chains, support internal product optimization and in the same time will allow reporting to the client according to the same LCA-model. In this case the supplier doesn’t need to disclose the recipe for its innovative products and designs, but a third part will audit and evaluate the quality of the provided LCAs and climate calculations. If a particular vendor claims that he can build sustainable and “green” engineering constructions this should be verified by an EPD. EPDs are the only LCA-format, which is allowed to use in procurement to evaluate and compare alternative designs (ISO/TR 14025: 2000). To use climate and energy calculations in the bidding for evaluation and rewarding of the best environmentally-friendly design requires specifying some key parameters for the LCAcalculation model. To archive the Swedish climate reduction goal contractors should be rewarded for using of innovative environmentally-friendly materials/solutions in the bidden process. This means that there is a need for a verification procedure to compare in a fair and easily way the project specific emission factors for contractors’ alternative designs. It can be archived with support of a digital EPD-tool, which was discussed and developed as a first draft in this joint project. The follow driving forces to use the EPD-tool has been identified: − Achieve multiple customer requirements, e g building assessment schemes’ requirements, internal product development etc with less cost − Reduce purchasing costs (fewer suppliers with better environmental performance) − Easier to get into a deal with a well-established process for EPDs − Trustworthy quantitative and qualitative communication on the market with environmental product declarations for truly environmentally friendly products − Identify the most environmentally sensitive components and processes in company’s product portfolio and work strategically with the improvement − Purchasing cost control and project development goal to much the client’ requirements to improve the environmental performance − Be able to steer towards increasing of renewable and recycled content in products/products, which is required by EU-directives − Able to meet future EU requirements with a well-established control of the environmental performance of internal processes.