Buro Trinius - Sustainability in Building Construction

International Standardization

In recent years, sustainable construction has become an item of international standardisation, both under ISO and CEN. International standards aim to provide the market with commonly agreed concepts, core contents and terms that shall enable harmonized understanding of "sustainable construction". Ultimately, such standards aim to avoid international barriers to trade.

Standards must bridge conflicts of interests between concerned parties. They result from usually long and intense discussion processes, aiming to establish international consensus.

A meaningful discussion of sustainability qualities of products, services and buildings is possible first when a common agreement on the meaning and contents of sustainable building has been achieved. This is the ultimate reason to develop international standards. They enable international communication of performance aspects along with internationally traded products and services.

Since the establishment in 2000, Buro Trinius is involved in international standardisation in the field of sustainability in building construction. Dr. Trinius is nominated expert to standardisation tasks in ISO and CEN, nominated by the Swedish Institute of Standardisation (SIS).

This involvement includes:

ISO TC59 SC14 Building Construction - Design Life, leader of the working group developing ISO 15686-6:2004 “Procedures for considering environmental impacts”, currently under revision to focus on the interface between service life and life cycle assessment, nominated Swedish Expert to all other working groups.

ISO TC59 SC17 Building Construction - Sustainability in Building Construction, leader of the working group developing ISO 15392:2008 “General Principles”, ISO TR 21932 “Terminology” and ISO 12720 “Application Guidance”, nominated Swedish Expert to all other working groups

CEN TC350 Sustainability of Construction Works – Nominated Swedish Expert to the working groups.

News and Highlights:
	Green Growth Leaders: Accelerating the sustainable economy - Buro Trinius presenting "how to count LCC and LCA" at the workshop on "sustainable living in buidlings". Take Lead conference, Copenhagen. >>>
	TRITON DGNB Gold: DGNB Gold pre-certificate awarded to Allianz Global Investors' redevelopment of TRITON office building in downtown Frankfurt.
	Danish Green Building Council: Buro Trinius presents life cycle performance as key to sustainable building at the "green building does pay" seminar of DK-GBC and the export initiative "energy efficiency" of the German BMWi, federal ministry of economics and technology. >>>
	EU R&D project IRCOW: Innovative strategies for high-grade material recovery from construction and demolition waste. R&D project under the EU FP7 programme. >>>
	Buro Trinius 2000 - 2010: 10 years in international standardisation, R&D, methodology development, building labeling and consultancy in the field of sustainable building
	Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen (DGNB) e.V.: Co-Initiator, founding member, Auditor, member of the technical board... DGNB is the German council for sustainable building, founded in 2007 >>>
	Institut Bauen und Umwelt e.V.: nominated independent verifier for environmental declarations of building products. IBU is program holder of the German environmental declaration scheme for building products. >>>
	Österreichische Gesellschaft für nachhaltige Immobilienwirtschaft: founding member and member of the technical board of the Autrian council for sustainable real estate >>>
	Europe-INNOVA 2008: STAND-INN awarded as best Europe-INNOVA Network 2008 Presentation on "Standards facilitating international knowledge transfer - the case of the construction sector" at the Europe-INNOVA conference, Lyon 2008
	International standard on sustainable construction: ISO 15392:2008 Sustainability in Building Construction - General Principles published in 2008