Building a Tox-Free, Circular, and Climate-Friendly Future: Policy Recommendations for Sustainable Construction

Policy brief highlights how tox-free, circular, and climate-friendly construction can be achieved through stronger EU-level action. Key recommendations include full chemical transparency, an EU-wide product database, and mandatory digital logbooks to track materials and their chemical content. To support circularity, the poster calls for pre-demolition audits, end-of-waste criteria, and recycled-content declarations to ensure hazardous substances do not re-enter the economy.

Mandatory Green Public Procurement (GPP) with harmonised EU-wide criteria is proposed to drive market change. Requirements include using non-toxic materials, eliminating PFAS, biocides, and SVHCs, ensuring M1-level VOC emissions, and favouring eco-labelled products.

Pilot projects across Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, and Latvia show these practices are already feasible—improving indoor air quality, reducing CO₂ emissions, and enabling high-quality recycling. The poster emphasises that better guidance, templates, and training can help mainstream these solutions across Europe.

Read the policy brief here

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