IBU Advi­so­ry Board appoints two new members

Dr Hans-Carsten Kühne and Prof Dr Mario Schmidt join the IBU Advi­so­ry Board with imme­di­ate effect.

The IBU Advi­so­ry Board (SVR) of IBU appoint­ed two new mem­bers to the board at its most recent meet­ing in June 2024. Dr Hans-Carsten Kühne from the Fed­er­al Insti­tute for Mate­ri­als Research and Test­ing (BAM) and Prof Dr Mario Schmidt from Pforzheim Uni­ver­si­ty will strength­en the SVR’s exper­tise with imme­di­ate effect.

Dr Hans-Carsten Kühne stud­ied at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Berlin and com­plet­ed his doc­tor­ate at the Chair of Build­ing Physics and Build­ing Mate­ri­als at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Ham­burg-Har­burg. He was man­ag­ing direc­tor of an engi­neer­ing office in Berlin until 2003. After join­ing the Fed­er­al Insti­tute for Mate­ri­als Research and Test­ing in 2003, he was respon­si­ble for binders and con­crete tech­nol­o­gy in the “Build­ing Mate­ri­als” group.
Since 2012, he has been Head of Depart­ment 7.4 “Build­ing Mate­ri­als Tech­nol­o­gy”. He is a mem­ber of numer­ous nation­al and inter­na­tion­al stan­dard­i­s­a­tion com­mit­tees (CEN, DIN BAST BAW) and chair­man of the Ger­man mir­ror com­mit­tee on con­crete repair. His core areas of exper­tise include high-per­for­mance and self-com­pact­ing con­cretes, rhe­ol­o­gy, addi­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing in the con­struc­tion indus­try, geopoly­mers, sus­tain­abil­i­ty of build­ing mate­ri­als and the util­i­sa­tion of resid­ual mate­ri­als in the con­struc­tion industry.

Prof Dr Mario Schmidt is Pro­fes­sor (C3) at the Fac­ul­ty of Busi­ness and Law at Pforzheim Uni­ver­si­ty and teach­es in the fields of sus­tain­abil­i­ty and oper­a­tions research. He heads the university’s Insti­tute for Indus­tri­al Ecol­o­gy (INEC), which he found­ed in 2010, and has suc­cess­ful­ly estab­lished the degree pro­grammes “Busi­ness Administration/Resource Effi­cien­cy Man­age­ment” (B.Sc.) and “Life Cycle & Sus­tain­abil­i­ty” (M.Sc.) as well as two doc­tor­al pro­grammes togeth­er with KIT Karlsruhe.

Mario Schmidt stud­ied physics and astron­o­my and com­plet­ed his doc­tor­ate on envi­ron­men­tal­ly ori­ent­ed mate­r­i­al flow analy­ses. Since 1985 he has worked in the fields of emis­sion con­trol, cli­mate pro­tec­tion, envi­ron­men­tal man­age­ment and life cycle assess­ment. He is respon­si­ble for numer­ous stud­ies and expert reports for fed­er­al and state min­istries and has pub­lished var­i­ous books, includ­ing on mate­r­i­al flow analy­ses, envi­ron­men­tal man­age­ment, life cycle assess­ments and car­bon foot­prints. Schmidt has con­tributed to sev­er­al ISO stan­dards and VDI guide­lines (ISO 14051/52/53, ISO 14067, ISO 14068–1) and is chair­man of the VDI 4800 “Resource Effi­cien­cy” guide­lines com­mit­tee. He is cur­rent­ly a mem­ber of the Resource Com­mis­sion of the Ger­man Fed­er­al Envi­ron­ment Agency and co-chair­man of the Envi­ron­men­tal Label Jury (Blue Angel). Prof Schmidt can look back on decades of expe­ri­ence in the field of Life Cycle Assess­ments (LCA) and car­bon footprinting.

He has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly involved in numer­ous LCAs for the Fed­er­al Envi­ron­ment Agency or for many com­pa­nies, is a recur­ring crit­i­cal review­er and has also worked method­i­cal­ly on the fur­ther devel­op­ment of life cycle assess­ments and car­bon footprints.

IBU Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Flo­ri­an Pronold wel­comes the appoint­ment and the will­ing­ness of the two experts to work on the Expert Coun­cil: “We look for­ward to their con­tri­bu­tions to updat­ing the IBU pro­gramme and mon­i­tor­ing our pro­gramme rules, in which our Expert Coun­cil has ensured the high qual­i­ty of our EPDs since the very beginning!”