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Certainty on construction products’ sustainability: facts from fiction

create by create
26 June 2025
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3 min read
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Certainty on construction products’ sustainability: facts from fiction

Back up sustainability claims with independent verification.

SPONSORED

Whether the pressure comes from customers, competitors or government regulators, the building sector will increasingly be required to think about how its work affects the environment, said Harriet Smith, Responsible Products Program Lead at the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA).

In her role, Smith works with manufacturers on product certification initiatives to drive the built environment’s transition towards products that are greener, more responsible and rooted in the circular economy.

“They’re going to lose business if they don’t start focusing on this,” she said.

“There’s a lot of pressure from consumers for manufacturers to be disclosing. From a built environment perspective, I know even architects are asking specific questions of manufacturers about how they comply.”

And because of the impact the construction industry has on the environment, taking sustainability seriously means that companies who want to do the right thing must make sure they – and their suppliers – are making a genuine difference.

Cold storage facility featuring MetecnoPanel.

Independent expertise

Some construction products, for instance, claim to have green credentials but offer no external validation of their sustainability, a situation that leads to poor outcomes and casts doubt on products with genuine sustainable attributes.

That scenario is one with which Smith is familiar, given GBCA maintains Green Star, its own internationally recognised sustainability rating and certification system.

“It’s all about building trust,” she said.

“If a manufacturer is making claims about where their materials are coming from, how they’re impacting nature, the circularity of their products – if any of that isn’t true, it has such a flow-on effect, because people are making purchasing decisions based on the claims manufacturers are making.”

It is important, then, that companies making sustainability claims – about the composition or carbon intensity of their products, for instance – can provide independent evidence to back up their assertion.

“A building can’t be sustainable when the components that make up the building are not sustainable,” Smith said.

“This doesn’t happen from a Green Star perspective, because we require third-party verification.”

To ensure that a rating system has that necessary level of independence, Smith explained, companies can look for ecolabels that are audited by people independent of the organisation. Those auditors should not have conflicts of interest, should not be affiliated with the company or manufacturer being audited, and should not be reliant solely on the organisation to be paying them a living wage.

Only truly independent ratings systems can ensure a manufacturer’s green credentials are credible. Along with the Green Star certification, such tools as Environmental Product Declarations, which integrate a life-cycle analysis of a product’s carbon output, can provide assurance about a product’s genuine sustainability.

For example, the Australian manufacturer of high thermal performance insulated roof and wall panels, MetecnoPIR, engaged leading sustainability consultant Edge Environment to develop its Environmental Products Declarations. These are based on cradle-to-grave life-cycle assessments, giving customers certainty that these materials genuinely do contribute to sustainable structures.

Similarly, MetecnoPIR’s roofing products are GreenRate Level A certified, the highest tier sustainability credential assessed by Global GreenTag International that was developed to align with Green Star’s green building features.

Third-party certification initiatives like these allow MetecnoPIR’s customers to be sure those products can be used in sustainable projects and deliver expected performance outcomes.

Duro Curlija, General Manager of MetecnoPIR Australia highlighted the importance of environmental credentials for the company’s products.

 “We are incredibly proud to manufacture products that deliver high thermal performance and contribute to building sustainability, and we wanted to demonstrate active leadership in this space through independent verification and transparency of our products’ green credentials,” he said.

Sending the right message

Checking for transparency and third-party certification matters because not all manufacturers possess the green credentials they would like to claim. In Smith’s experience, most manufacturers want to do the right thing, but some lack the necessary expertise in their organisation.

“We have a process; we have assessors who are checking information,” she said.

“For the products program alone, we require that third-party certification. We don’t accept products that don’t have third-party certifications.”

Organisations can invite reputational and commercial damage if they make misleading claims about the environmental credentials of their products

“I see a lot of organisations doing their best when it comes to communicating statistics about their product,” Smith said.

“But without that kind of sustainability knowledge or independent verification, there is definitely the risk that they could be communicating things incorrectly.”

MetecnoPIR offers certified sustainable construction products. Visit the MetecnoPIR website to learn more about the certification and third-party verification that demonstrates the environmental credentials of its products.

Tags: ConsultantsEngineersFire EngineersGraduatesSustainability rolesArchitectsCommercial designersPrincipals
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