by Brianna Crandall — July 6, 2016 — U.K.-based building sciences group BRE’s new online Life Cycle Assessment tool (LINA) went live last week, enabling companies and trade associations to assess their products in line with EN 15804, the European standard for the sustainability of construction products. The standard looks at the environmental impact of a product through its lifespan, from raw materials and manufacturing to application, use and disposal.
Data from the LINA assessment can then be submitted online for a BRE Global Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) stamp of approval, which demonstrates that the underlying data and data handling on the product’s sustainability are consistently reliable.
Speaking at the launch event, BRE’s Associate Director of Sustainable Products Dr. Shamir Ghumra said:
EPD are now increasingly demanded by clients and specifiers on global development projects that use sustainability standards like BREEAM, CEEQUAL and the Home Quality Mark. EPD will also become a prerequisite of BIM (building information modeling) as it gains market traction. We need to encourage more product manufacturers to get EPD, and LINA is the catalyst not simply because it is compliant with the required standard but it also enables companies to generate the data required themselves, thereby reducing costs.
LINA can also be used for product evaluation, product development, and internal benchmarking purposes. Its benefits are not limited to Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), either; the update to ISO 14001 last year now places greater emphasis on life-cycle perspective, and the outputs of LINA can complement an existing Environmental Management System, says BRE.
The LINA tool, developed with information technology (IT) software specialists PRé Sustainability, is available on the BRE Web site.
