The next major target set for the construction sector is achieving climate neutrality and calculating the carbon footprint of buildings. Unfortunately, directing the real estate development and construction sector en masse towards building carbon footprint calculations creates pressure to focus on energy efficiency — but not on resource efficiency. Yet climate impact and environmental impact are distinct effects, writes Anu Kull, head of Taasterahastu.
In connection with achieving climate neutrality, Estonia’s construction sector faces an incoming carbon footprint calculation requirement. The new Energy Performance of Buildings Directive introduces an energy label obligation for new buildings: all public sector buildings must be emission-free from 2028, and all new buildings must be emission-free from 2030.
Climate Impact and Environmental Impact Cannot Be Equated
The current methodology for calculating a building’s carbon footprint is largely based on Estonia’s database of construction materials’ climate impacts, which is recommended as the basis for calculating the full lifecycle climate impacts of buildings, structures, and infrastructure. The database describes the typical market situation and is intended for architects and designers with the aim of selecting the best design solutions from a climate impact perspective.
Climate impact is certainly a very important component of environmental impact, but climate impact is generated by energy use, whereas environmental impact is generated by both energy use and resource use. For the construction sector, this means that while a building’s energy efficiency is expressed in kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per square metre of usable floor area, expressing a building’s environmental impact requires accounting for the natural resources used in construction.
The conflation of climate and environmental impacts in this national tool also raises questions from a construction market competition standpoint. The environmental impact of construction materials in the database is expressed using the Estonian average CO₂ emission value, calculated on the basis of all available Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) data. Where EPD data is absent, Finnish or Swedish values are recommended.
However, an EPD — like an ecolabel — is by its nature a sales argument and a producer’s substantiation of green claims, and it should certainly be reflected in the tool that architects and designers use to select appropriate materials. Using the average value of a typical Estonian product does not currently allow for this.
What Does the Construction Products Regulation Say?
Estonia’s real estate sector has thus placed itself in a development trap by assuming that the lower a building material’s CO₂ emissions, the more environmentally friendly it is. This is not the case at all. Since the environmental impact of construction products cannot be assessed solely on the basis of climate impact, the measurement of construction materials’ environmental impact should be grounded in the Construction Products Regulation, which entered into force at the beginning of the year and shows how both climate and environmental impacts can be considered together in building design.
The expectations and requirements arising from the Construction Products Regulation extend to architects, designers, and manufacturers of building materials alike, because substantiating a new building’s environmental impact actually requires more than just the carbon footprint.
Entirely new is the requirement to demonstrate compliance with circular economy principles. In Estonia, this gives rise to a completely new problem. We operate under the assumption that the circular economy is waste management. Our prevailing view is that the longer we can keep products that have reached the end of their life in use, the more circular we are.
The separate sorting of waste and the rule-based organisation of waste management are, of course, necessary. But that is not the circular economy. If anything, it is the opposite.
Wandering in a Confused Conceptual Space
Equating waste management with the circular economy makes it impossible to enter the circular economy, because the concepts needed to express circularity are absent. Circular economy standards do exist and have been transposed in Estonia, but compliance with circular economy principles must be demonstrated under the Waste Act.
This means that what matters to us is recycling as a process, but we are not concerned with which resources we are able to reuse as a result. What matters to us is product reuse as a process, but we are entirely unconcerned with how much primary resource we save through that activity. What matters to us is abandoning fossil energy sources, but we see the only alternative as renewable or nuclear energy — not recovered energy.
The construction sector must be the first to find a way out of this conceptually deadlocked space. There is no choice: the Construction Products Regulation must be followed, and the sector must demonstrate its environmental impact across all lifecycle assessment-related essential characteristics and aspects. It is therefore not appropriate to direct designers and architects to select environmentally sustainable materials solely on the basis of climate impact — i.e. a building’s carbon footprint — as defined by the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive.
We will discuss and work through this journey in Jõelähtme, where the Housing Fair, running from 4 to 15 June, is applying a circular village economic model and will help to explain what the circular economy will mean for the construction sector in the future.
This article was published in Ehitusleht on 26 March 2025: Elamumess näitab kätte ringmajanduse teeotsa — Ehitusleht