Integrating environmental sustainability indicators in BIM-based product datasheets

This paper presents the findings of a research study conducted with the aim of assessing the effectiveness and completeness of the environmental sustainability indicators at national and international level. The need is to clarify the various constantly evolving regulations for sustainability in the construction sector and to have a unique list of indicators mixing the several existing approaches. Starting from the main regulations on sustainability of construction works, the research outlines the required environmental indicators. Since the construction sector is considered one of the most impacting from an environmental point of view, a great attention is given to the creation of a user friendly tool to collect and store different sustainability indicators to support design choices and to increase the awareness of construction and manufacturing companies and end users. Nowadays manufacturers use EPD (Environmental product declaration), which is regulated by the European Standard EN 15804: 2014 and at the same time by the International ISO 21930: 2017, as an environmental certification and communication tool by which they can declare the environmental performance of their products through the use of specific indicators. After analysing the actual European and International regulations about the sustainability of construction works, the draft of the European standard has been examined in order to compare the used indicators and create an integrated and complete version of product data template in order to collect all of these parameters. Furthermore, the Ministerial Decree of April 10, 2013 has introduced the so called CAM (Italian acronyms for Minimum Environmental Criteria) - made mandatory by Legislative Decree 20/2016 Procurement Code, amended by Legislative Decree 56/2017 - in order to give the general criteria and technical indications required by tin Italy to help the public administration to identify and choose among several works and products those with a lower environmental impact. The paper shows an integrated BIM-based template to be adopted for product datasheets that can be exploited by manufactures, designers, facility managers and consumers in order to ease the information exchange about environmental impacts.