Projects
About our research projects
Learn more about the projects and development initiatives that BASTA participates in. Here, we bring together information about each project's objectives, activities, and results, along with links to ongoing work and published materials.
Digital product passports for the construction sector
During 2025, the research project Digital product passports for the construction sector was carried out. The project’s overall objective was to help the industry improve the exchange and accessibility of sustainability data across the construction sector.
By bringing together, visualising, and digitalising product information, the project aimed to create the foundation for a clear and efficient platform where all stakeholders, including property owners, contractors, architects, suppliers, and private individuals, could access the latest and most accurate information about construction products. This would also deliver significant time savings by making information readily available and continuously updated.
One of the project’s objectives was to develop a prototype digital product passport with a focus on sustainability as well as health and environmental risks. Together with the project’s reference group, a concept was developed for collecting and consolidating open data from different systems into a shared database. These systems included eBVD (electronic Building Product Declarations), BASTA (environmental and health performance assessments), and CCBuild (Centre for Circular Building). The aim was to make the information transparent, easy to understand, digitally shareable, and interoperable.
Since the completion of the project, the results have been implemented in the BASTA system and a digital product passport has been developed. The digital product passport is designed to deliver data to different stakeholders and processes throughout a product’s life cycle, including procurement, builders’ merchants, building logbooks, facility management, and reuse. Where data is available, product content and sustainability information are now collected and maintained in one place, making it easier to support reuse and promote greater circularity in the construction sector.
Following the project’s completion, BASTA has also connected to additional data providers to collect and display information in one place, including Swedish Wood (Svenskt Trä) and the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning’s (Boverket) generic climate database.
The project was funded by Smart Built Environment.
Building materials and biodiversity: a new focus for sustainable construction
Biodiversity is one of the most pressing sustainability challenges of our time. The project "The impact of building materials on biodiversity", co funded by SBUF, aims to increase knowledge of how raw material extraction, manufacturing processes, and supply chains for construction products affect biodiversity and ecosystem services.
The project focuses on some of the construction sector’s most important material groups, including concrete, metals, timber, and glass. Its objective is to identify general principles and recommendations that can help guide procurement towards material choices with a lower negative impact on biodiversity. The outcome will be an openly available guidance document to support contractors, property owners, material suppliers, and other stakeholders in procurement and decision making.
BASTA participates in the project’s reference group, as the topic is closely aligned with our mission to drive the development of more sustainable construction products. Through our criteria and product assessment system, we already provide support for reducing climate related impacts and risks associated with hazardous chemicals. In the longer term, we see the knowledge generated by the project contributing to the development of new criteria, guidance, and information resources that help users take biodiversity into account when selecting materials.
For BASTA, this project represents an important step towards a more comprehensive sustainability perspective for construction products. By bringing together knowledge, building consensus across the sector, and developing practical tools, we aim to help make biodiversity a natural part of future sustainable procurement and product selection.