Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES) is a term used for Environmental Performance of construction.

Buildings have a significant impact on altering our environment, for good and bad.

Generally, negative environmental impacts that arise from building construction and renovation can lead to resource depletion and biological, diversity losses. Also building product manufacture and transport consumes energy, generating emissions linked to global warming, acid rain, and smog. Landfill problems may arise from waste generation. Poor indoor air quality may lower worker productivity and adversely affect human health.

Positive impacts are reduced ecological footprints and higher productivity.

Selecting environmentally preferable building products is one way to reduce negative environmental impacts, however this is not an easy task. There is a great deal of confusion surrounding environmentally sustainable design and their associated rating systems.

The best decision making processes use systematic methodologies for selecting building products to achieve the most appropriate environmental performance. The methodology needs to take a multidisciplinary, life-cycle approach, which considers multiple environmental impacts ranging over the entire life of the building system. Decisions based on single impacts or stages could obscure others that might cause equal or greater damage. This consideration must precede specification and purchase decisions. The strength of environmental life-cycle assessment is that it delivers true triple bottom line costing.

Environmental performance can be quantified using the evolving, multi-disciplinary approach known as environmental life-cycle assessment (LCA). Cetec can measure environmental performance using an LCA approach, using International Standards procedures.

Cetec adopts rational and systematic techniques for helping designers and builders to select environmentally friendly, cost-effective building products. Our models are aimed at helping product manufacturers develop green products. The model we use takes a multidimensional, life-cycle approach and uses environmental life-cycle assessment approaches adopted from ISO 14040 standards.  It aims to analyse all stages of the life of a product: raw material: acquisition, manufacture, transportation, installation, use and waste management.

One key problem is that product specifications focus on short-term physical and application parameters such as coverage, wear, colour and fire safety. Cetec, with its sister company. Foray Laboratories (NATA accredited) are often called upon to conduct additional testing to provide factual information on specific products. Composition, chemical emission, toxicity studies, environmental impact assessments, contamination of air, water and soil, applicator and user difficulties, realistic replacement lifetimes and specific user applications are all able to be measured in our laboratories or on site.

Most large projects now deliver a sting for suppliers that are not prepared for BEES.

For further information contact the BEES keepers, Cetec here.