SUSTAINABILITY


Flooring may be under your feet, but it can make a significant contribution to carbon neutrality throughout its lifecycle


turn used flooring directly into new products, inviting customers to sign up to our ReStart Programme to reduce waste and support their green-building certification systems.


Manufacturer’s policy To meet certification requirements, healthcare providers need more than warm words from their manufacturers and suppliers. Scientific proof, accreditation, and third-party assurance are required and these must be transparently shared with the customer. And sustainability standards are increasingly looking for measurable improvement over time.


Bringing it all together Manufacturer good practice is important but, to be useful in certification, the overall reduction in CO2


needs to be


measured. Project Managers will aim for their suppliers to provide this data. We have used the lifecycle stages described


Sustainable design contributes to the Hospital of the Future.


in this article to produce highly detailed Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) and Material Health Statements (MHS) for our flooring products. EPDs draw together analysis of each element of a product’s entire lifecycle and assess the environmental impact as a whole, including carbon emissions. An MHS is a scientific declaration that assesses any


potential health risks associated with the materials used in a product. Both documents are third-party assessed and made available to customers transparently. These measures should form an


essential part of a sustainable strategy to optimise products’ environmental impact and thereby meet customers’ needs. EPDs are also used in the Carbon Calculator offered to our customers. This includes emissions for each of the product-lifecycle stages: material, transport, energy consumption in manufacture, use, and end of life, to determine its calculations. The data used is third-party verified.


It all adds up This article has described an approach to lifecycle assessment for flooring. It is possible that a similar approach can be applied successfully for other products making up a building. If so, the combined carbon reduction across the various products could add up to something really worthwhile.


References 1 Embodied carbon is the total volume of CO2 emissions related to the life cycle of a building’s construction materials.


2 Source: AECOM-Acute hospital benchmark studies.


IFHEDigest Providing insights into the vast field of healthcare engineering and facility management IFHE DIGEST 2023 87


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