In 2022, we pushed for the EU Construction Products Regulation to live up to its full potential. While the fight is not yet over, we won some important battles.

Concrete, bricks, wood beams, windows… Construction products are essential components of the built environment that surrounds us. However, they also have a huge environmental impact throughout their entire lifecycle.

In Europe, construction products are regulated by a dedicated piece of legislation – the Construction Products Regulation. In the time of decarbonisation, the CPR is the lynchpin between energy-intensive industries and the built environment, two of the biggest contributors to EU emissions.

However, despite its potential, the CPR today does not address any of these problems. The European Commission’s proposal for revision, presented in March 2022, puts forward some small improvements in line with our calls, but the text is still too vague, and relies too heavily on standards to set the environmental ambition, instead of tipping the scale in favour of legislation.

Why construction matters

From water and energy to wood and concrete, it takes a great amount of resources to build our homes, offices and roads. In other words, construction products have a huge environmental impact. Materials such as concrete, bricks and insulation products are responsible for 50% of all extracted raw materials and 1/3 of fresh water used in the EU. Moreover, the manufacturing of construction products alone contributes 250 million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually.

To top it off, construction products and buildings are the main source of waste generation in the EU, representing 30% of our total waste, with most materials still ending up in landfill and less than 1% overall being reused in new buildings.

It goes without saying that it is high time for the construction sector to embrace sustainability and the circular economy. This is why the tabled revision of the Construction Products Regulation must put sustainability at its core.

Nothing is too technical

ECOS has become the most prominent environmental NGO actively working on construction products, advocating for a regulation in line with the principles of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, ensuring that sustainable (construction) products become the norm on the European market.

This work requires a deep level of expertise, and suits ECOS particularly well given the important issue standards pose in this sector:  CPR is one of the few pieces of EU legislation where obligations are actually set in standards, leaving their development in the hand of largely biased, industry dominated fora.

Right at the centre of things

The Commission’s proposal for a CPR revision was published in March, and rightly acknowledges the role of ecodesign for construction products and opens the possibility to develop minimum requirements – just as it will be done for other sectors. This is a great change in mindset, and new vision for the sector, in line with what we have long been saying: construction products are… products, and their environmental impacts should be tackled, starting with design. The EU’s ambition to ‘make sustainable products the norm’ should not be selective. There really is no valid reason not to tackle this extremely polluting sector, which has not been regulated by effective environmental legislation so far.

More needs to be done. The CPR is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to green the European construction market – as long as we are bold enough not to choose the easy way out, something we have been stressing time and again, when coordinating with other NGOs, or convincing MEPs at the European Parliament hearing on CPR.

Reports from the ENVI Committee, one of the two parliamentary Committees dealing with the file, agreed with many of our arguments, including on the need to avoid relying on standardisation when setting environmental ambition, as well as the need to regulate embodied carbon in polluting products, such as concrete, or to exclude cement from the CPR.

In fact, the planet would be much better off if cement was covered by an environmental regulation under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which could impose ambitious minimum requirements and significantly speed the work towards decarbonising this polluting sector (read more here).

In addition to proposing innovative solutions to protect our planet, throughout 2022 we also concentrated on drawing attention to the file. Working closely with national (Germany, Belgium, Sweden, among others) and EU partners, we focused on capacity building and information exchange, which, in turn, ensured that our messages and calls echoed across the European capitals. Without our determination and expertise, industry lobbies would be the only voices in these discussions.

We need greener, and we need it now

If the European Union wants a green transition, the construction sector and the CPR must work towards sustainability.

The industry should not be in a position to regulate itself within the standardisation system, allowing for dominant market players to not only pollute our planet, but also to limit competition and innovation. Policymakers must step in instead, and create mandatory minimum requirements for construction products to ensure that only sustainable, circular and low-carbon products can circulate on the European market.

Moreover, standards should be used in an appropriate way: in support of EU rules. Ambitious EU rules should then be underpinned by robust standards, but never the other way around.

Throughout 2023, we will make sure that this ambition is realised as much as possible. There is no time to lose.