The Institut Bauen und Umwelt e.V. (IBU) has introduced life cycle assessment rules for re-use products in its Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs).
These apply to products that are refurbished after dismantling and reused for the same purpose.
Until now, there were no regulations for the life cycle assessment of re-use products. The IBU Advisory Board has now adopted a new annex for re-use products in PCR Part A of the IBU regulations. This annex contains new accounting rules for the manufacturing and refurbishment phase (modules A1-A3). The rule is that re-use products are included in the system free of charge and only the environmental impacts from the new product system are included in the calculation. This includes, among other things, the costs of selective dismantling and all processes that can be attributed to reprocessing. All other modules of the EPD are calculated as usual. The aim of the new rules is to better support the circular economy.
“We are sensing a strong demand from the market to map the topic of reuse in EPDs. We are receiving inquiries from all product and material areas,’ explains Stefan Zwerenz, Head of the Verification Body at IBU. “This demand has prompted us to develop uniform and binding rules for this with our Advisory Board.
The rules that have now been published are therefore an important step for politicians and the construction industry to consider EPDs in the context of the circular economy. European legislation in particular, with initiatives such as the Green Deal, shows the need to focus more on the issue of waste prevention in the construction industry. For manufacturing companies that already apply re-use concepts for their products, it is important to be able to present the re-use of their products using normative, comparable and transparent data. It is therefore important for the IBU to offer a solution on how verifiable information on the circular economy can best be integrated into the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) in order to obtain a comprehensive and accurate picture of the entire life cycle of a construction product.
The IBU regulations focus specifically on the life cycle assessment. The EPD rules do not consider whether and under which legal regulations re-use products can be placed on the market and at what point they may be considered waste, the IBU clarifies.
We will be happy to provide you with the resolution of the Advisory Board on request.