Planning to go international with your building design? We look at what will changes to the latest BREEAM guides might mean for your sustainability ratings overseas.
As a scheme that was always intended to work tightly in conjunction with UK Building Regulations BREEAM has always been an unlikely star of the international stage but BRE has made it a success across Europe by tailoring the scheme to specific markets. This means today that, quite unexpectedly, the BREEAM scheme is subtly different in countries outside the UK.
What happened to MAT 04?
If you’re reading this blog and have even a passing interest in BREEAM you probably know that pipe insulation only features in a single section – MAT 04. Your first thought on opening one of the BREEAM international guides would probably be to go straight to MAT 04 expecting to see the same reassuring text that you’ll find in all UK versions of BREEAM…
…but if you do you’ll be in for a big surprise. The MAT 04 Insulation section of BREEAM International is an almost entirely empty page!
This is because insulation is not separately assessed as a standalone issue within the latest international versions of BREEAM. The guidance does note that insulation is incorporated in “MAT 01 – Life cycle impacts” and “MAT 03 – Responsible sourcing of construction products” (in the UK versions of BREEAM these explicitly exclude insulation) but insulation forms only a very small part of these credits.
A diminished role for insulation, a negligible one for pipe insulation
In theory the effective elimination of MAT 04 doesn’t change very much for pipe insulation. Of the credits traditionally awarded within MAT 04 one was already for responsible sourcing of materials along similar lines and actually leaned heavily on the details laid out in MAT 03.
This credit still requires materials to be sourced from companies operating, at the very least, an externally certified ISO 14001 compliant EMS. Even in the UK version it wasn’t mandatory for all insulation products to be compliant in order to achieve the credits and this is even more watered down in the 2016 international versions of BREEAM. Most projects will realise the MAT 03 credits before any insulation materials are assessed.
No role for the BRE Green Guide
The BRE Green Guide has long been BRE’s preferred means of assessing the environmental sustainability of products and has featured quite extensively within BREEAM. But the Green Guide is nowhere to be seen within the latest versions of BREEAM International.
In the place of the Green Guide are less proprietary methods of lifecycle analysis (LCA) that don’t allow for accurate comparison of the true environmental impact of products but which are easier for international companies to access.
This is the case in MAT 01 of BREEAM International. Not every building material used must be possess an LCA (and, unlike BREEAM UK there’s no minimum performance required – highly polluting materials can be used so long as they have an LCA) in order to achieve the credits on offer. Since pipe insulation is only a small part of any large project it’s likely that the credits will be achieved regardless of whether pipe insulation has an LCA or not.
Source: Kaimann UK · Copyright image: xxx
