Using standards to maximise the benefit of digitisation of construction product Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) to reduce Building Life Cycle Impacts

Abstract

Introduction: Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) provide standardised environmental information about the impact of making, using, and disposing of products – their embodied impacts and many are now provided digitally for use in Building LCA. Recognising the need to significantly reduce the embodied impact of our buildings, ISO/TC59/SC17 WG3 has developed ISO 22057 to standardise the provision of digitised and digitalised EPD and ensure EPD can be used to their full potential, as machine interpretable digitalised data. Methods: ISO/TC59/SC17 WG3 has developed the standard using for ISO procedures with liaison with those in ISO working on Building Information Modelling (BIM) and building level environmental assessment standards. Using the Vienna Agreement, CEN/TC350 is also participating in the work and should adopt the standard as a European Standard. Results: ISO 22057 will ensure digitised gate to grave EPD results are accompanied by machine readable and machine interpretable data. By standardising this process using ISO 22057, it will ensure that all building LCA tools and tool developers have access to common digital information in the most appropriate format to use alongside BIM. Conclusions: ISO 22057 offers the opportunity to provide standardised, machine interpretable EPD and generic data which will enable the rapid digitalisation of building life cycle assessment.