Environmental and health related criteria for buildings - ANEC

IBO - Environmental and Health related Criteria for Buildings
other assessment tools in line with current ecolabelling practices, confirmed by this study,
should be seen as the way forward and developed further.”
Joint ANEC / ECOS comments on the ISO 14000 series review
A detailed critical review of the LCA / EPD approach and corresponding standards is given in
the Joint ANEC / ECOS comments on the ISO 14000 series review,
http://www.anec.eu/attachments/ANEC-ENV-2007-G-030final.pdf
8.3. Main findings of the studies
Incomplete coverage of environmental impacts
LCA can only account for issues which can be quantified and aggregated (summarised),
such as energy consumption or greenhouse gases. Obviously many important environmental
impacts are not quantifiable in a meaningful way, e.g. biodiversity. Or in case of quantitative
indicators, such as noise, it might be better to build a separate (individual) category for them,
without trying to aggregate them with other impacts e.g. to a human-toxicity indicator. Many
impacts should not be aggregated as they are site-specific or depend on local concentrations
of pollutants rather than on total life cycle releases (e.g. noise, dust, or indoor air pollution).
These impacts may also depend on local conditions (e.g. water consumption in dry areas
versus wet areas).
PRAKASH, REINTJES et al, 2008 (page 6): “The disregard of site-specific aspects is of
conceptual nature and based on the fact that LCA seeks to aggregate environmental impacts
over the whole life cycle of products.”
Furthermore, some cause-effect relationships are not simple enough or sufficiently known
with enough precision to permit quantitative cause-effect modelling. In such cases, it will be
easier to work with qualitative and semi-quantitative indicators because the results are
presented in a disaggregated way. In other cases potential impacts should be avoided
following the precautionary principle (e.g. CMR-substances in building materials).
When such impacts are of significant environmental importance, their coverage becomes a
key requirement for achieving the overall goal of environment assessment. Hence, LCA
cannot replace other product specific assessment methodologies but can only accompany
them.
PRAKASH, REINTJES et al, 2008 (page viii): “It is recommended to focus on different
instruments, such as environmental impact assessment, chemical risk assessment etc. for
measuring the non-LCA-indicators. The characterisation models in such cases would be
rather formalised and not mathematical operationalisation of the environmental mechanisms.
There may be a basic aggregation step, bringing text or qualitative inventory information
together into a single summary, and/or summing quantitative inventory data within a
category.”
Correlation between LCA-indicators
As it was clearly shown in IMPRO (2008), LCA indicators correlate with energy consumption.
This is especially true on building level where specific characteristics of building materials are
Final Report 86 31 03 2011