Green Public Procurement and Construction Sector: EPD and LCA Based Benchmarks of the Whole-Building

Abstract

The paper discusses the possible use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) in European and Italian Green Public Procurement (GPP) for the building sector, in order to define targets based on objective and reliable building environmental impacts information. The research objective is to define how to set LCA benchmarks towards the improvement of GPP requirements. The study analyses the GPP criteria based on LCA in Europe with a focus on Italy; it proposes LCA benchmarks for selected groups of construction materials and scenarios for the implementation of LCA benchmarks related to buildings elements and whole-buildings. It also illustrates how public administrations can verify the GPP criteria achievement using EPDs.

Using an analysis of concrete and cement EPD: verification, selection, assessment, benchmarking and target setting

“…Pomponi and Moncaster reviewed carbon coefficients for cement and concrete in academic literature, identifying 58 coefficients across the two products [13]. Van Den Heede and De Belie similarly identified 12 datapoints for cement [14], Salas et al, reviewed the literature on LCA for cement and identified 16 embodied carbon datapoints [15], Ganassali et al identified 32 EPD for cement [16], Kurda, Silvestre and de Brito identified 17 cement datapoints and 20 aggregate datapoints [17] and Braga, Silvestre and de Brito identified 16 concrete datapoints [18].…”

“…Passer et al have written about how EPD are being used in the European Market [19] and Jelse and Peerens about how they can be used for Green Public Procurement [20]. Ganassali et al discuss how they produced benchmark values for cement using 32 EPD, using the median value of the range for the reference value, with limit and target values set using the boundaries of the upper and lower quartiles of the range distribution [16]. Jones has developed embodied carbon benchmarks using the arithmetic mean of datapoints from selected EPD and others sources for each product [12].…”

Using LCA and EPD in Public Procurement Within the Construction Sector

“…Even though LCA and EPD data is commonly used to quantify the potential environmental impact of construction elements or construction works, reality shows that in GPP, despite environmental considerations being implemented in a variety of European Member States, this data is not used in order to come to conclusions and make decisions related to product or supplier selection [3]. The presentations at the session showed different challenges to different types of stakeholder groups.…”

“…No matter how it is approached, LCA is a complex topic that requires a certain skill set to be able to interpret information generated by the study. So even if LCA and EPD data was to be available for all products participating in a public tender, there would need to be quite some knowledge required from the procurement departments in order to identify the best possible product for a certain application [3].…”

Embodied carbon, embodied energy and renewable energy: a review of environmental product declarations

“…Nuclear energy has a similarly low GWP per MJ as renewables but has a normal efficiency of 38-40% (DUKES, 2020) so 100 MJ electricity would have a primary energy requirement of 256 MJ (100/0.39). Other researchers have reviewed EPD to consider the variation in embodied carbon of stone wool insulation (Silvestre et al, (2015)), glass wool insulation (Hodková and Lasvaux, (2012)) and cement, bricks, wooden-based materials, steel, gypsum plasterboard, glass-wool slabs, stone-wool slabs and ceramic tiles (Ganassali et al, (2018)), but these studies did not consider the relationship with primary energy or secondary fuel use. Anderson & Moncaster, (2020) explored the relationship of embodied carbon (A1-A3) and non-renewable primary energy use and secondary fuel use reported per tonne in EPD for cements but did not look at renewable primary energy.…”