Insulation materials for building : dealing with climate change along with other challenges yet to come

Abstract In France, numerous regulations have been enacted to tackle climate change. The initial ones focused on the use phase of buildings, while the last regulation considered both the construction and use phases. Meanwhile, issues such as energy supply and resource scarcity are becoming increasingly important, but no current regulations address these challenges. To go further than climate change, five impact categories are studied: global warming potential, abiotic depletion potential – fossil fuels, consumption of primary non-renewable energy, transport distances, and abiotic depletion potential – elements. These categories are used to rank 11 insulation materials: polyurethane, expanded polystyrene, extruded polystyrene, rock wool, glass wool, hemp concrete, hemp wool, cellulose wadding, straw, semi-rigid wood fiber, and rigid wood fiber. For this purpose, we analyzed 664 Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) from the French EPD database, using a functional unit of 1 m² of insulation with an R-value of 5 m²•K/W. It appears that bio-based materials generally performed better than conventional ones across all five impact categories. However, the ranking based on the five indicators provided a nuanced view of the ranking solely based on the global warming potential and did not significantly alter the overall ranking.