Data Upload No Longer Restrict­ed to ÖKOBAUDAT Update Cycles

With ÖKOBAUDAT (www.oekobaudat.de, the Ger­man Fed­er­al Min­istry of the Inte­ri­or, Build­ing and Com­mu­ni­ty (BMI) has made avail­able a stan­dard­ised data­base for the life cycle assess­ments of build­ings. It serves as a source of bind­ing infor­ma­tion for both the Assess­ment Sys­tem for Sus­tain­able Build­ing (Bew­er­tungssys­tem Nach­haltiges Bauen für Bun­des­ge­bäude, BNB) and the Ger­man Sus­tain­able Build­ing Council’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Nach­haltiges Bauen, DGNB). The data sets con­tained in it are dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed into gener­ic data and com­pa­ny/or­gan­i­sa­tion-spe­cif­ic data that is pro­vid­ed in the form of EPDs. The EPD data is, to a major extent, pro­vid­ed by the Insti­tut Bauen und Umwelt e.V. (IBU), oper­a­tor of the Ger­man EPD pro­gramme for build­ing products.

Although it has not been pos­si­ble up until now to enter new data out­side of the reg­u­lar ÖKOBAUDAT update cycles, begin­ning imme­di­ate­ly, data sets may be trans­ferred at any time to the ÖKOBAUDAT using the IBU’s EPD Online Tool (www.epd-online.com. After approval by BBSR these EPD data sets will then be direct­ly acces­si­ble in the build­ing life cycle assess­ment soft­ware tools that have been incor­po­rat­ed into the data­base, e.g. the eLCA tool pro­vid­ed by the Ger­man Fed­er­al Insti­tute for Research on Build­ing, Urban Affairs and Spa­tial Devel­op­ment (BBSR).

Dec­la­ra­tion hold­ers inter­est­ed in hav­ing their data sets sub­mit­ted to ÖKOBAUDAT are request­ed to use the IBU EPD Online Tool to com­plete the required digi­ti­sa­tion para­me­ters for their EPDs. Instruc­tions as to how to do this are pro­vid­ed in our Webi­nar “Trans­mis­sion of EPD Data Records into ÖKOBAUDAT”. If you have any fur­ther ques­tions about this process, please con­tact Nora Pankow at the IBU home office.