Materials standards loom

Environmental standards for building materials will soon be launched in Britain based on European research by the pipeline industry, CJ has learned.

German and Austrian resear-chers are backing Dutch work on how the environmental impact of different pipeline materials should be quantified. Their work confirms the Dutch methodology, which will form the basis of a draft British Standard and an international standard on building materials.

The work on the standards has come out of the intense competition between the materials industries involved in the pipeline sector. The standards will be based on life cycle analyses of different materials from materials extraction, use and re-use.

"The standards deal with the methodology of comparing different materials," said a spokesman for the Concrete Pipe Association. He said that work done by the Austrian Government and at Stuttgart University, in Germany, confirmed that Dutch researchers had produced the best system.