Have you got enough badges? Want another one? If your Kitemark, BBA Certificate, FENSA registration, BFRC Energy Rating, ISO 9001 registration, ISO 14001 registration, et al, aren’t enough, then another one may be coming your way soon. There is a proposal at European level for a scheme called GREEN-IT. This what they say about it :

Currently only environmental labelling (for building products) is applied in some EU countries and in different ways. The project aims to pilot implement energy labelling of EU manufactured and marketed building products with customised approaches according to each participating country’s needs. The EU industry is involved in the project with voluntary mechanisms and product labelling is used as a mean to promote best practice in construction products manufacturing and motivate the sector to further compliance with the new EPBD.

The pilot label is primarily based on thermal performance criteria and building operational energy within the EPBD needs; EU building products will be assessed, benchmarked and further labelled based on their contribution to the overall building performance. However, the customisation of the labelling criteria and requirements foreseen, to suit the actual market and industry demand of every country aims at bringing together the different practices and bridging the diversity that characterises product labelling procedures in the EU.”

Greece is leading the scheme and in this country it is being run by our old friends the Building Research Establishment. The EU have chucked in €1.5m of support funding, so they are serious about it. Windows are one product category that is being considered for inclusion. The aim is to have on a database details of U value, g value and/or BFRC Window Energy Rating for as many windows as they can lay their hands on. In fact, BRE say they details of over 100 windows already on a database. As U value and g value are used in energy ratings and, as these ratings get taken up more widely (they are increasing exponentially although the overall numbers remain fairly low as yet), then the information will be readily available. Unlike the energy rating system using the A to G we see on white goods, GREEN-IT will not rank or grade windows. Which begs the question of what the scheme is for, really. At least for the window industry.

However, with the pressure on sustainability we are likely to see more demand from specifiers for what are termed Environmental Product Declarations (and no, you can’t just claim your windows are Dolphin Friendly and have done with it!). There is an ISO for EPDs (ISO 14025) which gives the rules for making environmental claims and it could be that the database of GREEN-IT could expand to cover all those aspects. The idea is that someone could log on to the database and ask, perhaps, for all windows which meet UK Building Regulations requirements or better, or all windows with a U value less than 1.2, say, and the knowledgeable user would be then able to compare other environmental aspects of the qualifying products to make an informed decision.

But that’s in the future. In the short term, there appears to be little value in getting this badge to show that you have information on your U and g value on a central database in Brussels or wherever. There is far more to environmental issues that just these two characteristics which are not being considered for inclusion on the database. Embodied energy, distance from manufacturer to site, hazardous substances – an almost endless list springs to mind.

Then there’s the issue of policing. If it is left to manufacturers to input their own claims without any form of third party checking of the data, then the unscrupulous will no doubt exaggerate their claims and would thereby ruin the credibility of the database after the false claims had been discovered, as they inevitably would.

And then there’s the cost. This scheme has obviously got to raise revenue to maintain the database although the likely scale of any charges has yet to be discussed. Third party vetting of lots of environmental data is going to be expensive and the benefit to manufacturers, at least of windows, appears diminishingly small.

The project is less than half way through its predicted 30 month duration so the scheme may change and its usefulness may change, too. It may become something we, as an industry, should support. Or it may even be dropped if no useful benefits to manufacturers are found.

In the meantime, we have Window Energy Ratings with 135+ windows rated C or better, well above the minimum Grade E or D in the Building Regulations, which qualifies them for the Energy Savings Trust Energy Efficiency Recommended badge. The number of BFRC registrations is rising so fast that staff cannot cope with a clumsy web site which requires too much time to input data so a new site is under construction to speed things up. I believe that the best advice for manufacturers is to get a BFRC Window Energy Rating and, if the GREEN-IT scheme ever gets up and running, then the U value and g value of your products will be there and independently verified for all the world to see and could easily then be put onto a European database. They couldn’t charge a lot for that. Could they?