Environmental impact of construction products - possibilities and limits when comparing different wall constructions / Umweltwirkungen von Bauprodukten - Möglichkeiten und Grenzen beim Vergleich verschiedener Wandkonstruktionen

Life cycle assessments quantify the environmental impact of goods and services. Increasingly, their results should be used for variant comparisons in construction planning and procurement.
For the ecological assessment of wall building materials, this should not be limited to the assessment of the blocks, but the influence of insulation, plaster and mortar have to be taken into account as well. The considered wall should also fulfil predetermined properties such as a certain U-value.
The LCA data available today still do not permit any comparison of variants. For this, product-specific life cycle assessments/environmental product declarations would have to exist on the basis of uniform background data. Because the latter are being constantly developed and there are hardly any product-specific calculations, comparisons today are very inaccurate and subject to great uncertainties.