The IBU Board

The IBU’s more than 300 mem­bers are com­pa­nies and asso­ci­a­tions from more than twen­ty dif­fer­ent coun­tries. Although they pos­sess a com­mon goal of mak­ing con­struc­tion more sus­tain­able, this results in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent inter­ests and opin­ions – not least, because of the dif­fer­ent – and some­times com­pet­ing – indus­tries. Pre­cise­ly this type of diver­si­ty with­in the build­ing mate­ri­als and con­struc­tion prod­uct sec­tors is rep­re­sent­ed by the fif­teen mem­bers of the IBU board. They include share­hold­ers, exec­u­tives, and asso­ci­a­tion rep­re­sen­ta­tives. The result is that the work under­tak­en by the board is based upon a broad range of com­pe­ten­cies and that strate­gic deci­sions are made in con­sen­sus, tak­ing into account the vary­ing perspectives.

Mile­stones of the IBU Strategy:

• The IBU pro­vides infor­ma­tion about its EPD pro­gramme and its com­mit­ment to sus­tain­able con­struc­tion and has already achieved a high lev­el of recog­ni­tion. Thanks to this com­mit­ment and to the edu­ca­tion it pro­vides about the envi­ron­men­tal dimen­sion of sus­tain­abil­i­ty, along with the trans­paren­cy of all of its pro­ce­dures, the IBU enjoys a high lev­el of acceptance.
• The IBU is in con­stant dia­logue with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the busi­ness, sci­ence, stan­dard­i­s­a­tion, and polit­i­cal sec­tors and par­tic­i­pates in var­i­ous com­mit­tees through­out Ger­many and Europe to pro­mote sus­tain­able building.
• The con­tin­u­ous updat­ing of the EPD pro­gramme leads to increas­ing inter­na­tion­al recog­ni­tion of IBU EPDs.
• As co-founder of the ECO Plat­form, the IBU is work­ing to imple­ment a uni­form Europe-wide approach to pro­vid­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty infor­ma­tion for build­ing prod­ucts, con­struc­tion mate­ri­als, and build­ing components.
• The IBU was inten­sive­ly involved in achiev­ing agree­ment on a har­monised stan­dard for all con­struc­tion prod­ucts, which forms the basis for all EPDs in the Euro­pean Union.
• The IBU par­tic­i­pat­ed in the prac­ti­cal adap­ta­tion of exist­ing inter­na­tion­al stan­dards to the con­struc­tion indus­try in Ger­many and con­tin­ues to be involved in this project.
• Thanks to the EPD Online Tool, the cre­ation and ver­i­fi­ca­tion process for EPDs is now done online. The IBU has there­by made it easy for man­u­fac­tur­ers to cre­ate EPDs, and is also con­tin­u­al­ly work­ing to opti­mise this tool. For exam­ple, EPD con­tent is now machine-read­able, mak­ing it eas­i­er for users to fur­ther process the data.
• The IBU has digi­tised sus­tain­abil­i­ty infor­ma­tion: On the IBU.data plat­form, data from the life cycle assess­ments of con­struc­tion prod­uct man­u­fac­tur­ers’ EPDs is avail­able in XML files based on the ILCD for­mat (Inter­na­tion­al Ref­er­ence Life Cycle Dataset) that has been expand­ed for EPDs.
• The IBU con­tin­u­al­ly gains new mem­bers, offer­ing them com­pre­hen­sive ser­vices relat­ed to spe­cif­ic tasks in EPD cre­ation as well as sup­port­ing them in their com­mu­ni­ca­tions and pub­lic rela­tions efforts.