The Building Products Innovation Council (BPIC) is the peak Trade Association for the producers of materials and products used in building and construction.  The objectives of BPIC are to act as the voice of the industry to government and the public, promoting innovation, best practice and competitiveness. Its member companies employ 200,000 people directly and contribute $54 Billion annually to the Australian economy. 

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is generally acknowledged as the most complete and robust method for assessing the environmental impact of anything, including buildings and the materials that they are made from.  However, the data available to LCA practitioners internationally is typically not based on consistent methodology – each sector adopting an approach that plays to that industry’s strengths – the wood products sector emphasis sequestered carbon, the metals industries emphasise recyclability, the concrete and masonry industries emphasise durability.

This means that whole building or design assessments that utilize materials from many sectors may not draw reliable conclusions of the environmental impacts of their building.  LCA has been used by all sectors to tell incompatible stories.

In 2007, BPIC committed to establishing a robust “level playing field” basis for conducting life cycle assessment in the building and construction sectors to address the above inconsistencies.  During the following three years, BPIC worked in partnership with Federal Government on creating a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), which was published in June 2010. The findings are published on the BPIC LCI website, the information available includes:

  • A cross-sector consensus agreed methodology, for data collection and impact assessment
  • A database of generic average Australian building product life cycle data for 121 materials and products, which constitute over 99% of the buildings and infrastructure constructed in Australia
  • A set of multi-stakeholder environmental impact weightings from surveys in 11 different cities providing a consistent way of interpreting LCA outcomes
  •  A Protocol for the correct and appropriate use of the data in full LCA studies

This is a significant first for Australia, a prior UK initiative with 23 product sectors could only achieve a majority report after 10 years and a US National Life Cycle Inventory project was not able to achieve consensus on key methodological issues.

Since its publication, the BP LCI data has been used:

  • As the basis for LCA based materials credits in the Australian Green Infrastructure Council’s (AGIC) Infrastructure Sustainability (IS) rating tool.
  •  For the Australian and New Zealand collaborative Transport Authorities Greenhouse Group (TAGG) assessments of the greenhouse gas footprint for alternative road constructions – this has resulted in the Green Gauge CO2 roads calculator.
  • To underpin the development of National Standards for Australian ecolabels and Environmental Product Declaration for building products – these comprise a series of standards with Masonry Products, Windows (and Glazed Doors) and Roofing Systems in progress and Pipework, Carpet and Flooring systems under consideration.  These should establish a new consistent set of ecolabelling standards underpinned by robust LCA and focused on the key causes of impact – in this way they should also be cheaper to implement without compromising on the robustness of environmental outcomes.

The Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society (ALCAS) also propose to establish a register of Environmental Product Declarations for Australian products.

The next steps for the BP LCI are further refinements and updates to the BP LCI website and to the published datasets.  In addition, these will be offered for sale to LCA practitioners as fully modeled data compatible with the 2 major data protocols (ILCD and Ecospold) such that the data can be used immediately with LCA practitioners software (most commonly Sima Pro and GABI).  These should be available in the next 12 months.