Ranking responsible source assessments for building materials

An increasing amount of building materials is traded worldwide. The raw materials needed to construct buildings are often extracted in different places than where they are used. This creates social, economic and environmental impacts that are inflicted in other locations than where the building is constructed. To gain insight in these impacts and to be able to reduce them, certification schemes are developed. This research concentrates on the social impact of global construction material extraction and production, and can be used in multi-aspect sustainable building assessment tools. In this paper, we propose a framework for the ranking of certificates to assess the social impact of global construction material extraction and production. With this framework, new assessment schemes can objectively be added to a tool. This framework is already being integrated in BREEAM-NL, but can also be used for other countries and other assessment methods than BREEAM.