Calculators to the ready

In Finland, the Saint-Gobain teams are assessing the environmental impact of certain products. A crucial step towards reducing the carbon footprint of our buildings.

Buildings account for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in Finland. While that is less than the global average of 39%, it is still too high. Saint-Gobain therefore has a crucial role to play by taking action from product design through to end-of-life.

Saint-Gobain’s Finnish teams decided to work with an outside partner, Bionova, to assess the environmental impact of certain solutions combining several Group products, by analyzing the life cycle as required for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs).

Products were selected from the Weber, ISOVER and Gyproc ranges. The modeling results were then compared to alternative solutions for similar applications. The study reports showed that Saint-Gobain’s products had a smaller carbon footprint than its competitors’.

An interior wall in Weber’s Kahi brick, for example, emits half as much CO2 as the alternative solutions, that is a savings of 20 kg of CO2 per square meter. For an equal surface area, the difference corresponds to the quantity of CO2 that can be stored by a Finnish forest in 50 years. Given this data, the choice of building materials takes on a whole new level of importance.