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concluded  ·  2017–2018

PEF4Buildings: applying the Product Environmental Footprint method to office buildings

Tested whether the EU's Product Environmental Footprint method works on whole buildings, and set out how benchmarks and performance classes for offices could be defined.

Whole life carbonData & benchmarksPolicy & regulation

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Context

The EU’s Product Environmental Footprint method was designed for products. A building is not a product: it is assembled on site from thousands of components, lasts for decades, and its environmental performance depends as much on how it is used as on what it is made of. Whether a product method survives that jump is not obvious, and the answer matters, because benchmarks and performance classes for buildings were being designed on the assumption that it would.

PEF4Buildings tested it. The project was commissioned by the European Commission and carried out by VITO, KU Leuven and TU Graz.

Insights

  • Two real office buildings, deliberately different. A PEF study of the BelOrta office in Belgium, a business-as-usual new build, and of Baumschlager & Eberle’s BE2226 in Lustenau, Austria, a nearly-zero-energy building. Different climates, very different energy performance - between them a test of whether the method holds across the range it would have to cover.
  • Then benchmarking. An approach to benchmarking new office buildings and defining performance classes: how to define the reference building, where to put the system boundary, how many reference buildings are needed, and what to do with the range of options that remain.
  • Then the link between products and buildings. How the assessment of a construction product’s environmental performance connects to the assessment of the building it ends up in - starting from the two office studies and extended to other European building typologies.
  • Tested in the open. Two full-day stakeholder workshops in Brussels, in July 2017 and January 2018, where the draft results were put in front of the people who would have to work with them.

Impact

The question PEF4Buildings asked is the one that keeps returning: a method that works on a product does not automatically work on a building, and a benchmark is only as meaningful as the reference case behind it. That is the same problem the later European benchmark work and the harmonisation work through Annex 72 were set up to address.

Results

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