InDa­ta: Focus on the dig­i­tal EPD

At the ini­tia­tive of the Inter­na­tion­al Open Data Net­work for Sus­tain­able Build­ing (InDa­ta), on 16 Feb­ru­ary, in con­junc­tion with the BauZ! 2017 Con­gress in Vien­na, an inter­na­tion­al work­shop was held, enti­tled ‘Link­ing Build­ing Infor­ma­tion Mod­el­ling (BIM) to Life Cycle Assess­ments (LCA)’ – with par­tic­u­lar focus on Envi­ron­men­tal Prod­uct Dec­la­ra­tions (EPDs).

InDataWork­shop par­tic­i­pants, who rep­re­sent­ed EPD pro­gram hold­ers and EPD data­bas­es and includ­ed stan­dard­i­s­a­tion and life cycle assess­ment experts, focused on a pre­sen­ta­tion of the on-going and planned nation­al ini­tia­tives and projects for stan­dar­d­is­ing the link between BIM and LCA. It was deter­mined that there is a grow­ing need for coor­di­na­tion amongst the par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­tries of Nor­way, Aus­tria, Great Britain Ger­many, Swe­den, and Spain. Infor­ma­tion exchange would allow the estab­lish­ment of require­ments for data exchange, includ­ing EPDs, and, at the same time, pre­vent dupli­ca­tion of effort. ‘Dig­i­tal EPDs’ make it pos­si­ble to pro­vide embed­ded soft­ware tools, which can then be used to gen­er­ate build­ing life cycle assess­ments. There was unan­i­mous agree­ment that the exist­ing for­mat of the Inter­na­tion­al Life Cycle Dataset (ILCD) should be used as the basis for future amend­ments to ISO and CEN stan­dard­i­s­a­tions. This infor­ma­tion will be dis­sem­i­nat­ed at the upcom­ing ISO stan­dard­i­s­a­tion meet­ing to be held on 9 March 2017 in Paris, and an update will be pro­vid­ed at a fol­low-up work­shop in Berlin in 2018.

Sub­se­quent to the work­shop, the InDa­ta net­work held their 6th meet­ing on 17 Feb­ru­ary, focus­ing on the top­ics of EPD stan­dards, data qual­i­ty, and data exchange, includ­ing the result­ing require­ment for a data­base network.