Jurriaan van Stigt column
Mamma mia, here I go again. My my, how can I resist you? Lately I've been thinking a lot about this ABBA hit when I see what we're doing to get products into the ‘National Environmental Database’. Because despite all the good intentions, in practice it turns out to be still too easy not to have to invest in innovation.
In order to be able to make a fair calculation for the ‘Environmental Performance of Buildings’, each building material must get for the National Environmental Database the most accurate possible product card with ‘Life Cycle Analysis’. The Environmental Investment Allowance, or in Dutch the Milieu Investeringsaftrek (MIA), is intended to encourage this: an indirect subsidy for creating a new product card or including a minimum number of products with a high recycling score in a design. Such a request is quite a task, but we go for it and are working on it now for one of our projects.
At the moment, the required ‘Environmental Performance of Buildings’ standard of 1.0 is actually easy to achieve with the available generic values for products. It does not matter whether a brick is fired on coal in Portugal or on gas in the Netherlands. Result: there is no reason whatsoever for producers to have a specific calculation made for their product, let alone to become more sustainable. It costs the small producers too much money, especially if you could also regress compared to the competition.
As designers, we don't get any further like this. It takes far too much effort to even find those three suitable products with a reasonable amount of recycled products and biobased raw materials at the start of the design process. How nice it would be if manufacturers saw this arrangement as an opportunity to prepare for the future.
In the absence of that, I would say: put down the standard, to 0.5 for example. Only then will everyone really have to put effort into producing and designing with more sustainable materials. Then a Dutch brick that is produced with hydrogen can suddenly really compete.