BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability) Please

For more than 25 years, the Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed and automated an approach for measuring the life-cycle environmental and economic performance of building products. Known as BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability), the tool reduces complex, science-based technical content (e.g., over 500 material and energy flows from raw material extraction through product disposal) to decision-enabling results and delivers them in a visually intuitive graphical format. BEES Please is a voluntary program to collect data from product manufacturers so that the environmental performance of their products may be evaluated scientifically using BEES. NIST will publish in BEES an aggregated version of the data collected from manufacturers that protects data confidentiality, subject to manufacturer’s review and approval. BEES measures environmental performance using the environmental life-cycle assessment approach specified in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14040 series of standards. All stages in the life of a product are analyzed: Raw material acquisition, manufacture, transportation, installation, use, and recycling and waste management. Economic performance is measured using the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard lifecycle cost method, which covers the costs of initial investment, replacement, operation, maintenance and repair, and disposal.

The latest form for BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability) Please expires 2023-04-30 and can be found here.