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Life cycle assessment project |
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Friday, 30 April 2010 00:00 |
TDA continues to work with the other major material groups (i.e. concrete, steel, brick, plasterboard, windows and roof tiles) through the Building Products Innovation Council (BPIC) on life cycle assessment. The main goal of the project is to establish an Australian database of all Australian produced building materials and rules for comparing the environmental impacts of buildings, building elements and products.
The plasterboard and brick associations have completed their survey of their Australian manufacturers and have placed the information in a database set up by the CSIRO as part of the project. The survey of Australian manufacturers of most wood products (sawn wood, particleboard, MDF, LVL and plywood) has been completed, and the data is undergoing some road testing by LCA practitioners at RMIT in Melbourne. Some of the rules around interpretation of the inputs and outputs and the relationship to environmental impacts have been challenging for timber. For example, the categories land and water use are particularly tricky for timber, as Australian impact assessment models are at very early stages of development. The use of European models, commonly utilised by LCA practitioners, can result in very misleading results if inputs and outputs are reported out of context. TDA is working hard to make possible the development of Australian models in these two critical areas.
In another part of the project, late last year 217 people attended a series of workshops around Australia to air their views on the relative importance of different environmental impacts ranging from global warming to water use. These views are being condensed into ‘weightings’ to allow the distillation of all environmental impacts into a single number by which to simplify comparisons.
The completed work and documents will be valuable tools for the building and wood products industry in setting some of the parameters of current and future life cycle assessment based tools – such as ecolabels and environmental product declarations. Currently, these are produced by non government organisations such as Ecospecifier, GECA, and Green Building Council, but a number of organisations are developing more robust tools. The completed work will also help the industry to guide the direction of anticipated future government regulation in this area. The whole project will be completed by the end of 2010 and is in its third year. |
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