How to fulfill the EU Taxonomy requirements for buildings using healthy construction products

The EU has designed its Taxonomy Regulation to support its European Green Deal objectives. It is filled with criteria, and it might seem difficult to comply with all. For buildings, healthy construction products with safe material ingredients can help you fulfill these EU Taxonomy requirements. Here is how.

What is the EU Taxonomy?

The EU Taxonomy is a classification system that defines which economic activities are environmentally sustainable. It aims to guide investments toward achieving the EU's climate and energy targets. The EU Taxonomy has six environmental objectives:

Climate change mitigation.
Climate change adaptation.
Sustainable use and protection of water and marine resources.
Transition to a circular economy.
Pollution prevention and control.
Protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems.

To achieve these objects, the taxonomy includes two main criteria:

Whether an activity significantly contributes to sustainability; the Technical Screening Criteria (TSC).
Whether an activity Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) on sustainability.

To be aligned with the taxonomy, companies need to comply with the DNSH criteria.

How are buildings covered in the EU Taxonomy?

There are sector specific criteria for sustainability, covering for example the energy, transport, and forestry sectors. The EU Taxonomy covers buildings in three categories:

7.1 Construction of new buildings
7.2 Renovation of existing buildings
7.7 Acquisition and ownership of buildings.

These categories specify requirements for buildings and thereby construction products.

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How can construction products ensure buildings fulfill the DNSH criteria?

Pollution prevention and control

Objective 5, pollution prevention and control, aims to minimise and control pollution from air, water, and soil. Construction products need to be free from hazardous substances. In addition, minimal off-gassing of formaldehyde and carcinogenic substances needs to be assured.

Appendix C details requirements on chemical content of construction products. Some requirements are already according to European law, whereas some other requirements demand additional documentation from manufacturers. Ecophon products comply with all these requirements and a signed statement is available in the download centre.

There are also specified limits on how much a construction product can emit of certain compounds. Products covered by Eurofins certification Indoor Air Comfort comply with these limits. All Ecophon products comply with these limits.

Transition to a circular economy

Objective 4, transition to a circular economy, focuses on promoting resource efficiency and reducing waste. It encourages economic activities that prioritise recycling, reusing, and extending the lifespan of products and materials.

To comply with the DNSH criteria, at least 70% of non-hazardous construction waste need to be diverted from landfill and reused or recycled into new construction products. Energy recovery may not be counted in this 70% figure.

Construction products that could be reused or recycled can contribute to reaching this target. Most Ecophon products can be recycled from a technical point of view. To assure that recycling takes place, Ecophon has introduced the comprehensive recycling service SoundCircularity, that recirculates the products into new construction materials. Ecophon even requalifies old tiles in Sweden to be resold and reused in a second life. Read more about SoundCircularity.

Climate change mitigation

Objective 1, climate change mitigation, requires a calculation of a building’s carbon footprint over the entire life cycle. Construction products should be covered by Environmental Product Declaration, EPD. This reveals specific data on each product’s carbon footprint, that you can use to calculate the total building carbon footprint. All Ecophon EPD documents (currently over 120 documents) are available in the EPD International library, or in Ecophon’s download centre.

How to show compliance of construction products

At the moment, compliance with the EU Taxonomy requirements on chemical content and formaldehyde emissions is showed in self-declarations. The praxis in some European countries is to go one step further and demand evidence from construction products suppliers. All Ecophon products comply with relevant EU Taxonomy requirements.

The requirement for formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds, VOC, is satisfied through the enrollment in Eurofins certification Indoor Air Comfort–a third-party certification that has even stricter requirements than the EU Taxonomy^*. Ecophon’s SoundCircularity contributes to circularity targets of building projects, to reach the 70% diversion target. The applicable documentation is available in the download centre.

^*After a standard test period over 28 days, according to EN 161516 and ISO 16000-3:2011, or similar, the maximum allowed concentration of formaldehyde is 0.06 mg/m³. The maximum allowed concentration of carcinogenic volatile organic compounds (VOCs, category 1A and 1B) in such a test is 0.001 mg/m³.