The PEF4Buildings project is commissioned by the European Commission and is carried out by the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), KU Leuven and TU Graz. The aim of the project is to test the applicability of the PEF method Guide (Commission Recommendation 179/2013 on The use of common methods to measure and communicate the life cycle environmental performance of products and organisations) and the latest versions available of the related guidance documents developed in the framework of the Environmental Footprint pilot test phase (European Commission (EC), 2017) to a new office building, and to provide an overview of pros and cons of alternative possible approaches to the definition of the benchmark and classes of performance for the typology of buildings within the scope of the study. The assessment and the overview will contribute to the development of a final approach to develop benchmark and classes of performance for different typologies of buildings. As a first step (Task 1), a PEF study on two new office buildings is performed. The first building is the office building BelOrta of BelOrta CVBA, designed by the architectural firm ar-te and built in Belgium. The second building assessed in this study is the office BE2226 of Baumschlager & Eberle, Lustenau, Austria. The BelOrta building is a business-as-usual new office building, while the BE2226 building is a nearly-zero-energy building. These hence allow to test the PEF method to buildings located in different climatic contexts and varying in energy performance. In a second step (Task 2), a possible approach to benchmark office buildings and to define classes of performance for newly built office buildings is developed. The approach is developed based on the findings of the PEF study on two new office buildings (from Task 1), the latest version of the PEF Guidance document available at the that time (v. 6.1 mainly and for limited aspects v. 6.2) (European Commission, 2017) and a dedicated desk research. It covers issues such as how to define the reference building, how to define system boundaries, how many reference buildings should be defined and how to handle this range of different options. A third step of this study (Task 3) is devoted to the assessment at the building level, and more specifically how to link the assessment of the environmental performance of construction products to the assessment of a building by using the PEF method. The assessment starts from the results of the PEF study on the two new office buildings from Task 1, but is extended to other possible European building typologies. Two 1-day workshops with stakeholders were organised (Task 4). At the first workshop (July 5th, 2017, Brussels) the draft results of the PEF study (Task 1) were presented. At the second workshop (January 29th, 2018, Brussels) the draft results of the desk research on benchmarking and performance classes of office buildings (Task 2) and of the assessment at the building level that links the environmental performance of construction products with the building assessment by using the PEF method (Task 3) were presented, followed by an interactive discussion with the stakeholders. This report is the final report of this project (Task 5). It includes an executive summary of the activities carried out during the contract in English, French and German. All previous reports prepared (of Tasks 1, 2 and 3) are annexes at the end of this report, including the minutes of the stakeholder workshops organised (Task 4).
