Cerame-Unie attended the World Sustainable Buildings 2014 conference on 28-30 October in Barcelona. The event brought together experts from all over the world in the field of sustainable buildings and offered 144 sessions, distributed in 8 time slots, 3 plenary sessions and 3 roundtables. At the first session of the conference Are buildings that burn down sustainable?, speakers discussed the importance of fire safety in buildings.
Various sessions of the conference focused on issues related to various building schemes in Europe. “An agreement on core indicators is needed to harmonise buildings assessment at European level”, said Andrea Moro from iiSBE. Josefina Lindblom from DG Environment spoke at the session Building Sustainability Assessment, How do we make lifecycle assessment mainstream?, and explained that the Commission will be working on an EU framework with core indicators. According to her, the first set of indicators will be developed within the next two to three years.
The Active House Alliance organised their 5th Symposium which was divided into two sessions. The first focused on awareness raising and mainstreaming of sustainable building solutions. At the second session, speakers and participants exchanged experiences with Active House’s design and evaluation tools. Michał Piasecki, senior researcher at the Polish Building Research Institute, a member of the ECO Platform, presented the added value of the ECO Platform Environmental Product Declaration at the session, Which should be the contribution of life-cycle assessment in Nearly Zero Energy Buildings?.
The TBE PCR guidance document for developing an EPD was distributed to various experts at the conference. The next World Sustainable Buildings conference will take place in Hong Kong in 2017.