Our Working Group for Downstream Tools

TOOLWOG

 

FRAMEWORK CONDITIONS

Building LCA is the method to assess the environmental performance of buildings throughout the life cycle. The environmental performance of construction products is only to be assessed in the building-context, to correlate impacts from production stages of used materials with the impacts of the whole building.

Digital LCA tools need reliable environmental data from all used products in a machine-readable format. Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) were created for this purpose. Aligned conventions for data format, quality and verification are required. ECO Platform developed common rules for all ECO Platform Programme Operators that get audited regularly to ensure compliance with the guidelines. The ECO EPD are offered in digital ILCD+EPD format.

It is now important to make all ECO EPD data accessible in machine-readable way from a single access point and free of cost. Only then, the problem of data silos (own data pools for the different LCA tools) will be overcome and the effort for product manufacturers will be reduced to an acceptable minimum.

Furthermore, product-neutral data for all relevant construction products is to be made accessible via the same portal to close existing data gaps and to allow for early design comparisons as well as baselining.

 

THE ROLE OF ECO PLATFORM IN THE CONTEXT OF TOOLS

The Mission of ECO Platform is to promote and to contribute to the sustainable development, including a low-carbon economy and resource efficiency in the construction sector, by coordinating the development and provision of credible and scientifically correct data from products.

Via its ECO Portal, it provides a single access point and aggregated view of the digital EPD data provided online by its members and serves as the contact for tools who are interested in using digital EPD data as well as generic product data via a unified API.

 

MANDATE OF TOOLWOG

• Specify market requirements for further development of the ECO Portal and the offered data
• Identify technical issues of data providers with digital data exchange via ECO Portal and specify technical solutions
• Serve as a forum for tool vendors (downstream users of the EPD data) and data providers to discuss and specify requirements for the data and ECO Portal API
• Serve as an instrument for ECO Platform to communicate with the tool vendors