The construction and real estate industry is one of the most resource-intensive sectors of the economy with a high, negative impact on the environment. In order to significantly reduce this impact, the environmental impact of construction products and materials must be taken into greater consideration when constructing buildings. To this end, manufacturers must be able to provide the relevant information digitally in future. Only in this way will it be possible to take a circular economy view of the built environment. The European Green Deal is a package of measures aimed at making the EU climate-neutral by 2050 and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030. This also affects construction products.
With the Sustainable Product Initiative (SPI), the Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP), the Fit for 55 package and the Renovation Wave, the EU is launching four key packages of measures that focus on sustainability, the circular economy and the environment and will have a major impact on the construction and real estate sector and the supplier industry. The Digital Product Passport (DPP) has been established to provide the necessary data in a machine-readable format, which should enable better integration of construction product information across the life cycle of buildings. On the one hand, this should enable the environmental impact of the manufacture and disposal of buildings to be reduced to a minimum on a common basis. On the other hand, it should ensure that the building materials used can be optimally reused or recycled at the end of the life cycle. The DPP is therefore a key component in improving sustainability in the construction and real estate industry, securing value for owners and ensuring the efficient use of resources.
Anyone who manufactures construction products or places them on the market is directly affected by the Construction Products Regulation (CPR)! For its part, the CPR is heavily influenced by EU regulations as part of the European Green Deal, such as the Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulation (ESPR). The ESPR collects information from products in buildings and helps to ensure that construction products in the built environment are traceable and last longer.
The digital networking of building product data in building models enables better planning of buildings over their entire life cycle. This transformation of the industry is urgently required by society. Politicians now have the opportunity to set the appropriate framework conditions for a common basis of understanding for networked building product data.
This white paper illustrates the connections between the upcoming legal and regulatory requirements and the resulting requirements for the digital planning, construction, operation and dismantling of buildings. The circular economy places high demands on the digitalization of the construction industry: construction products must be clearly identifiable, classifiable and comparable with each other. Data quality and interoperability are therefore of central importance. The data dictionaries provide an important basis for understanding here, helping to improve the machine readability of data by providing a standardized structure and terminology for product information in the public domain.
In order to structure and standardize information on construction products, the EU is developing the Digital Product Passport (DPP), a solution based on ISO 233861 and ISO 233872. Manufacturers and distributors of construction products can use it to make their product information available in machine-readable form on the basis of common dictionaries. A Product Data Template (PDT) helps to create templates for such digital data sheets, which then only need to be filled in. The digital product data sheets are uniquely identified and stored in registers, and the information remains digitally networked for all stakeholders throughout the entire life cycle of a building. The repeated typing and interpretation of data from different formats and with different designations, along with the associated complications, is no longer necessary. The simplified use of this data via algorithms promotes automated evaluation and optimization and supports all aspects of the construction and real estate industry, from planning, use and disposal through to the construction entry of buildings. This is because evaluations of building models, e.g. with regard to sustainability, circularity, transparency, costs or maintenance, depend to a large extent on the building product data.
1 ISO 23386:2020 – Building information modelling and other digital processes used in construction
2 ISO 23387:2020 – Building information modelling (BIM) – Data templates for construction objects used in the life cycle of built assets
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