This guidance is primarily aimed at public procurers involved in a range of contracting agreements related to building materials and products. This includes the purchase of building materials for construction works, but may also extend to material extraction, manufacturing, building, retrofit, refurbishment, design, interior fit out, and end-of-life demolition or deconstruction processes. 

Plastic pollution and climate change are serious and interconnected threats to public and planetary health, as well as major drivers of global social injustice. Prolific use of plastics in the construction industry is likely a key contributor, resulting in burgeoning efforts to promote the recycling or downcycling of used plastics.

The environmental consequences of plastic solid waste are visible in the ever-increasing levels of global plastic pollution both on land and in the oceans. But although there are important economic and environmental incentives for plastics recycling, end-of-life treatment options for plastic solid waste are in practice quite limited.

Presorting of plastics before recycling is costly and time-intensive, recycling requires large amounts of energy and often leads to low-quality polymers, and current technologies cannot be applied to many polymeric materials.

Given increasing concerns for the marine environment and human health, as well as trade restrictions from Asian countries, plastics have become a great challenge for the United States.

This study addresses the seven commonly used plastics: low-density polyethylene/linear low-density polyethylene, high-density polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, and other plastics.

Over the past four decades, global plastics production has quadrupled. If this trend were to continue, the GHG emissions from plastics would reach 15% of the global carbon budget by 2050. Strategies to mitigate the life-cycle GHG emissions of plastics, however, have not been evaluated on a global scale.

In recent years, awareness of the negative impacts of plastic waste and pollution on our environment has heightened. Popular television documentaries, such as the BBC’s Blue Planet II, and mainstream media campaigns have played a significant role in bringing these issues to the forefront of the public’s consciousness.

The focus of this has largely been on single-use plastics from consumer products and packaging. There has been relatively little attention on the use of plastics in construction, both from a short and long-life perspective.

The role of plastic materials in construction has become indispensable in the past decades with regard to the global megatrends urbanisation, climate, health, environment and affordable housing. 

The Inventory of Carbon and Energy (also know as the ICE database) is an embodied carbon database for building materials which is available for free on this page. It contains data for over 200 materials, broken down into over 30 main material categories. The first version was released in 2005 and it has been updated at periodic intervals. 

The Construction Material Pyramid from CINARK at the Royal Danish Academy makes it possible to compare, for example, CO2 footprints between different categories of materials or between material types within the same category. It also makes it possible to view different kinds of environmental impacts across the different materials. It thus offers a tangible, interactive calculation tool and at the same time opens up a dialogue about more detailed studies of the materials’ position in the pyramid and later their place in the project design.