Development of a new environmental scoring methodology for building products, a French case study

Abstract

Abstract The building sector consumes about one-third of total final energy and contributes to 38% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions around the world. Thus, the EU has established a set of directives that includes the EPBD and the EED to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Hence, France adopted more challenging legislation by introducing the new environmental regulation RE2020. Among other measures, the RE2020 allocates a carbon budget to new housings starting from 2022. As a consequence, it promotes the use of materials and products that have a lower environmental impact. In this low carbon material competition, one of the challenges is related to the comparability of environmental product declarations (EPDs) and the lack of harmonization in terms of functional units and lifespan. Also, EPDs have multiple impact categories that make the decision-making process complex. In this context, the objective of this research is to develop a new environmental scoring methodology for building products based on their life cycle assessment. The methodology has been applied to two product families: windows and insulation as case studies thanks to the French EPD database called INIES.