Spread of Innovative Solution for Sustainable Construction Erasmus Project

Project Title

Spread of Innovative Solution for Sustainable Construction

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Environment and climate change; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship

Project Summary

Promotion of life-cycle thinking: LCA-related environmental information are usually used in business-to-business communication. On the other hand business-to-consumer information with a life cycle approach are limited to eco- or footprint labels only. “Man in the street” has very limited knowledge about environmental impacts and their causes.

Engaging the man in the street: Involving them In our project we will focus on educating average people, who are interested in building their homes, about the environmental impacts of building materials. Such awareness raising and knowledge sharing will be conducted by usage and the preparation of online and offline, easy to use and understandable education materials to improve the background knowledge and awareness of ordinary adults. The content will include easy-to-read concept descriptions, practical examples for non-experts, suggestions and best practices and even potential cost saving solutions. One key stakeholders of our program would be young adults who are in the age of founding a new family, establishing or renovating a new home with the support of financial incentives offered by the government. In our program, we would like to:

1. educate and explain to owners why it is important to examine the construction materials available on the market and their properties from a sustainability perspective before the construction.
2. highlight the environmental impacts associated with housing and its maintenance from a life cycle approach, from the extraction of building materials to the end of the life cycle of houses up to demolition, or to the reuse of material origin from demolition.
3. raising such environmental awareness related to building materials make and indirect favourable effect on building material manufacturers and designers to make a shift toward an sustainability focus and criteria.

Selecting a key industry: The selected industry is the building and construction, which consumes 40% of energy sources and produces 35% of the CO2 emissions. It is also in the focus of the EU’s target sector of shifting into a more sustainable path through increasing energy efficiency (see: 2012//27/EC, 2018/2002/EC and directives 2018/844/EC). Thus, it has the potential of significantly decreasing environmental impacts, and therefore is a perfect field to introduce and test such awareness raising education tools. On the other hand, consumers or people who plan to build or repair buildings are many and their behavior and choices have a huge impact on the final environmental performance of buildings. They also have the ability to influence the supply side with their choices. Besides, construction and building industry has already a wide experience in life cycle related analysis with many case studies, examples and communication tools. A vast amount of information available for this sector that have to be collected, synthesized, summarized, translated into an easy-to understand dissemination material and transferred to non-expert citizens.
Utilizing the consortium’s already existing skills: In our consortium we already have a lot of experience about what to include and how to educate adult people but we will also interview and listen to other stakeholders with experience in environmental communication to consumers. The partners have already gained proven expertise in life cycle assessment and dissemination projects as well.
Delivering key meaningful outputs: We want to develop a web application that includes environmental data for different building materials (CFP or Energy Content, EPD) and market information (availability, price). Until now, information about technical parameters has been published, but there is no database combining these sustainability aspects. This would be an enhanced version of One Click LCA.
We want to develop a handbook “Practical advice for sustainable smart houses and renovation” to spread of innovation solution.
Expected results: We consider it is important that environmentally conscious approach should be strengthened on the demand side, because the nature of buildings have a long-term environmental and maintenance impacts. When we speak about green home or sustainable home there is no clear term. The civil population would like to have a green home, but they do not really know how, and what should be the first step to realize it. The handbook and the web application helps to awake the number of responsible citizens who do care about the environment, and can become an active participants in protecting the environment and preventing climate change. As a result, the man in the street can become sensitive to today’s key environmental problems, and the carbon footprint will reduce.
The importance of this intellectual products will be shown by ÉMI non-profit Llc. at the international Construction expo “Construma” in April 2020 and 2021 in Budapest. On the LCA Conference in November, in January 2021 Helsinki and in June 2021 in Italy

Project Website

https://howtobuildgreen.eu/en/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 288594 Eur

Project Coordinator

LCA Center Magyar Eletciklus- elemzok Szakmai Egyesulete & Country: HU

Project Partners

• EMI EPITESUGYI MINOSEGELLENORZO INNOVACIOS NONPROFIT KFT
• ECOINNOVAZIONE SRL
• BIONOVA LTD